Wednesday 19 August 2009

Super Zoom Control is really super!

The web mapping site 192.com has a very nice map zoom control which dynamically displays a representative image of the map at the prospective zoom level.


This nicely addresses a problem which has occurred in a few applications I've been involved with recently - how to communicate to the user what a given zoom level actually looks like.

At first I thought the control might be truly dynamic - i.e. pulling a live tile from the centre point of the current map view. But it's actually just a set of tile snippets at a fixed point. Still, it provides a very nice effect. (The dynamic version would be simple to implement, but perhaps would be too slow in actual use, with unpredicatable latency).

Are you listening, OpenLayers?
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5 comments:

  1. Jody Garnett19 August 2009 at 21:52

    We had the dynamic version in an earlier copy of GeoTools (when the library was focused on applet development). We needed to remove it due to a patent on magnification tools ...

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  2. Unknown20 August 2009 at 05:55

    Cool. I will use this idea in the software i3Geo.

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  3. Dr JTS20 August 2009 at 10:16

    Sigh... is there no end to this rampaging patent craziness? Fie on it I say! Go Edmar! (and go OpenLayers!)

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  4. Dr JTS20 August 2009 at 11:14

    Actually, Jody, I'm not sure your patent issue applies to this concept. The SuperZoom control isn't displaying a live magnified view - it's just displaying a set of predefined images which represent the different zoom levels. Hard to see how that could be patented.

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  5. Jody Garnett25 August 2009 at 16:21

    You are probably correct; your idea of being dynamic though is probably covered.

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