A big change happened this fall. Right around the one-year mark I finally succeeded in migrating Shade Map (shademap.app) onto a vector based map. Up

ShadeMap 2021 Wrap Up

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Style Pass

2022-01-14 19:00:11

A big change happened this fall. Right around the one-year mark I finally succeeded in migrating Shade Map (shademap.app) onto a vector based map. Up until this point I used tiled image maps which downloaded many small, square image tiles and stitched them together. Vector based maps instead download lists of GPS coordinates and use these coordinates to draw the roads, buildings and contour lines in the browser. Because the data is drawn on the fly, you can choose to draw the map with south pointing up. Or you can draw the map as if it’s tilted at 45 degrees. So Shade Map can now be rotated and viewed in 3D perspective, just like Google Maps. Here’s a demo I posted on Twitter at the time:

Finally ported https://t.co/I2lujZ4zou to @Mapbox GL and it is beautiful! #gis #topography #cartography #maps pic.twitter.com/OURJAbboYn

The other major change was to the time/date slider. Previously the slider was a basic form slider with emojis indicating sunrise and sunset: