[OSM-talk] some notes, ostensibly from MapQuest (sorry if this is spam)

Richard Weait richard at weait.com
Wed Oct 20 06:31:27 BST 2010


On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 8:40 PM, Antony Pegg <antthelimey at gmail.com> wrote:

> open.mapquest.in for India - rather big deal for mapQuest actually.  First
> site out of EU & NA we've done in...a looong time. All thanks to the power
> of OSM.  Comments from co-workers in our Banglaor office were very
> enthusiastic. Hoping it as cool a thing as it seems to have country/language
> specific portals.

Nice.  I let a friend of mine there know about it.  Perhaps he'll get
his students mapping.

> In that vein, Belgium and Austria (.be and .at) rolled out today too, in
> Europe.

Nice again.

> Mostly un-noticed by the popular press(sic) - we restored the Locator /
> Search in map toolbar from the main commercial website, that sits above the
> map.  Basically it gives handy icons to just turn on "categories" of POIs
> (points of interest) on to the map.

I just spent too much time playing with this.  I can choose the color
of the icons by switching them on in order.  Want purple restaurant
icons? Select restaurant fourth.

> However - completely unmentioned anywhere except this email so far, was the
> "Search Nearby" stuff - something else we wired back up from the main
> MapQuest site.
>
> If you get a search result, you'll notice a "search nearby" link by your
> result - so you can find one thing (eg: the Jeremy Bentham) and then search
> for something else around it (eg: cinemas).

That's pretty cool.  I'm still learning how to use this one.  I want
to be able to just hit enter to start my search but it seems like I'm
causing something else to happen some times and end up looking at the
region, rather than just the city I was looking at.

At one point I had two different nearby searches in different tabs.
Not sure how I did it, and I wasn't able to do it again.  I should try
again in the morning.  ;-)

> We're still working thru wiring up some of the categories..but one of our
> use cases was that if you have a saved route (into My Maps...you ARE using
> the My Maps feature, right?) you can search along the entire route.  At the
> 11th hour we found out Nominatim didnt have Corridor Search (thats searching
> along a route highlight, instead of just inside a bounding box).  Twain
> added this feature to Nominatim in about 2 days.  two days!! thats pretty
> hardcore in my book!  I just wanted to rave about that.

Okay, that's pretty slick.  Two days work, Twain?  Wow, what can you
do with a week?  ;-)

Nice stuff, Ant.



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