Alrighty Then!

Just did a quick wrapper around the GeoRSS reader classes, got GeoFeeder; then simply couldn’t stop to improve it.

Try any GeoRSS feed you know of, but be aware: every feed sucessfully parsed will be “recorded” for all other users to see.

See the GeoFeeder page for details.

Thinks i like most (in the shared feed-repository):

• Nature/Weather : USGS Earthquake data
• Earthpublisher.com -  Effective …
• The faulkner_usa Pool …
• Water Right Documents
• Traffic: ÖAMTC-Spritfeeds …

To test the recent changes to my maptech library and to feature the omnipresent Geo-RSS feeds, i put together a simple yet powerful (at least i hope so) GeoRSS viewer.

Features

• renders Atom 1.0, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0
• supports W3C, Simple and GML feeds
• implements RSS 2.0′s TTL

BTW, please add all georss-feed-urls you have and give feedbackon on fault.

Please note: All feeds that are successfully loaded, are valid xml and can be parsed as one of the above formats, are “recorded” for other users.

Check the demo.

The user interface hides behind the little georss-icon top-left. Be sure to test some of the feeds, then chose another map, then add an overlay …

Update: now includes Mars and Moon.

After some thinking on how to integrate the code for linearly-projected maps (zoomify …) and mercator-projected maps (almost all others) into a single AS3 model, i found a very good, easy and straight-forward architecture.

The trick was to separate the coordinate conversion into two steps:

1. linearisation and
2. linear interpolation on the pixel data.

Linearly projected maps ( like zoomify) skip step 1 and only do step 2.

The demo: FlexMap

All layers tagged “(overlay)” are mostly transparent. All others need to have their alpha value changed to not cover the layers “below”.

Enable some layers and adjust their alpha by clicking on the slider. Dragging the sliders is a bit strange, because you also can arrange the layers with drag&drop.

Drag the map around and use the mouse-wheel (or the upper right) buttons to zoom in and out.

Doing another viewer for a 200+ maps project, i discovered that combining overview and detail maps in the same view, rendered the system unusable with only a few layers.

Naturally i did some optimizations on the layer drawing code. This resulted in a dramatical performance improvement when combining large overview maps with detail maps in the same view.

No more performance penalty. Why not show all of your data at once.

Please see the multi-layer demo showing ~140 maps (Oct 31st, 2008).

Every layers visibility and alpha can be controlled. Arrange depth order with drag and drop.

As RSS and GeoRSS get more popular every day, here are my 2ct:

Once again recycling old code: pulled my RDS/TMC decoder out of the drawer and made a running setup. Then wrote a simple script to generate a GeoRSS feed from it. The hardest part is getting the traffic information formatted right: having a icon on the (accident’s) location and displaying the affected area as a line.

Several searches gave no real satisfying results. Finally i modified some VE and GE demo-code to get at least close to what i wanted: see it on Virtual Earth and Google Maps.

As you can imagine, i’m working on a) a flex version showing the traffic info b) in realtime. Stay tuned.