[OSM-talk] open aerial map

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Wed, Dec 05, 2007 at 11:16:46PM +0000, Steve Coast wrote:
> 
> On 5 Dec 2007, at 19:28, Christopher Schmidt wrote:
> >
> >OAM provides a spherical-mercator projected tileset for users who are
> >interested in it, but the 'default' is designed for use by the
> >cut-and-paste web map developers of the world at the moment, and the
> 
> Unlike all those cut-and-paste web map developers of the world who use  
> that google map thing?

Those aren't web map developers :)

More seriously, They're not going to be able to cut and paste a WMS URL
from an OpenLayers config, no matter what I do. Instead, they should be
using the "Using With Google Maps" documentation:

http://wiki.openaerialmap.org/Using_With_Google_Maps

Or, if they're an OSM user, they can just open:

http://wiki.openaerialmap.org/Using_With_OSM

Both of these are linked from "Using OAM", which is right on every page.

I suppose one could make the argument that I should be using the Google
Maps API for OpenAerialMap, if I really cared about making it easy for
people to develop custom applications based on the basemap. I think that
sufficient documentation is a reasonable counter argument to that. 

What is the number of users creating custom tile overlays for Google
Maps compared to those creating their own OpenLayers applications? I'm
not convinced they're even an order of magnitude different: certainly,
in general, I see many cases where OpenLayers is used to access some
custom tile service, and relatively few where Google Maps is used for
the same purpose these days.  

In any case, I think that getting started with Google style tiles is
easy once you read the documentation, but if you're *not* using Google,
it tends to be way harder to reproject all your data than it is to read
a couple lines of docs: I think the early adopter deployments showing up
practically the same day as the service was launched is evidence of
that.

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta