Blog - Development Seed

Mapping and Open Data Events in Lima This Week

Development Seed — 2012-02-22T00:00:00-08:00

We’re holding two mapping events this week in Lima, Peru. Last night we held a Geo and Open Data Meetup, the second of its type. We had a great turnout last night, with 30+ people coming out to talk about geo and geodata.

30+ people came out to talk about geo and open data.

The meetup consisted of several lightening talks on topics like scraping for data, reflections on DAL, and OpenStreetMap Peru. I presented on using TileMill and OpenStreetMap to make custom maps, and Ruben presented on on his work opening up data with the local municipality of Huamanga.

Ruben presenting on his work opening data with the local municipal government in Ayacucho.

Tonight Ruben and I are leading a training on designing custom maps with TileMill. We’ll cover topics ranging from geographic information system basics, basic TileMill, choropleth map creation, data processing for census mapping, to mention a few topics. If you’re new to TileMill, I recommend arriving at 5:00 pm with your laptop, and we can help you get it installed. Full details on the training are posted on opendata.pe. There is no cost for the training, and all are welcome to attend.

Based on last night’s turnout and discussion it is clear the community and interest is growing. We hope to hold more events relating to geo and open data in Peru moving forward. Watch opendata.pe for updates on events.

Week in DC Tech: President's Day Edition

Development Seed — 2012-02-20T00:00:00-08:00

Happy President’s Day! While it’s a short week for some, it’s still a full week of technology events in the city. Below are our picks for the week, and you can find a full calendar over at DC Tech Events.

Monday, February 20

7:00 pm

NodeDC + DCjQuery Meetup: Tonight the NodeDC and DCjQuery groups are joining forces for a joint meetup on all things JavaScript. Lightning talks will cover topics like async.js, HTML Canvas, and building gaming sites. Come out to learn about Node.js and meet developers working with it, jQuery, and JavaScript.

Tuesday, February 21

7:00 pm

Django District: This month’s Django meetup will have lightning talks on seven different topics related to the web framework, ranging from integrating EC2 and Github to building multilingual sites to what’s coming in Django 1.4. Come out to learn more about Django and meet other developers using it.

NetSquared Meetup: This month NetSquared will host a conversation with Clay Johnson, author of The Information Diet, where he’ll discuss his book and answer questions.

Wednesday, February 22

7:00 pm

ONA DC: This month’s meetup will look at LegiStorm, a site that puts out data on Congress and all of its staff. Specifically, folks from LegiStorm will demo their new paid subscription service and show what data it includes.

Thursday, February 23

7:15 pm

Selenium Basics: This month’s meetup around Selenium, a web application testing system that automates browsers, will cover the basics of creating and running tests.

Visualizing the Media Landscape in Afghanistan

Development Seed — 2012-02-20T00:00:00-08:00

Access to media and news is severely limited in Afghanistan. Internews, as part of its support of local media efforts, just launched a data visualization of the media landscape in Afghanistan, mapping comprehensive survey data on media usage and access in the country. This hard data helps Internews and other organizations target their efforts on the ground and decide what actions need to be taken first.

Commissioned by USAID, its partner Altai Consulting conducted 6,648 close-ended interviews across 107 districts in all 34 provinces of Afghanistan. We then processed this data to visualize the survey results, making the data easy to explore and easy to reuse. The site lets you explore people’s access to the radio, television, mobile phones, and the internet - with internet access being the most limited at just 9% in the country as a whole. On the internet tab, hovering over provinces reveals five provinces where citizens reported they had no internet access.

In Baghdis, which does not have any internet access, only 22% of the nearly 500,000 citizens have electricity and 70% are illiterate. Similar stories appear for other provinces without internet access, such as Zabul, Laghman, and Uruzgan. All are rural, all have high illiteracy rates, and all are without internet. Digging deeper into the maps shows that some of these provinces without internet do have access to other media. Uruzgan and Laghman have very high access to radios and mobile phones. In Uruzgan 99% of respondents reported listening to the radio daily and 90% own a mobile device, with numbers at 77% and 73% respectively in Laghman.

Data captured in the survey and visualized on data.internews.org/af-media helps inform Internews’ strategies for supporting local media initiatives in provinces throughout Afghanistan, which is reflected in their support of 46 local, independently operated radio stations. By focusing on radio infrastructure and training local journalists to reach rural areas, Internews empowers citizens in the difficult realities of low electricity and high illiteracy. Read more about Internews’ work with this survey on their blog post.

The data

All of the survey data is available through data.internews.org/af-media/data, and is released openly and available to download, process, and work with.

The technology

All maps on the site were created using the free and open source map design studio Tilemill and hosted with MapBox. To learn how to start creating maps yourself, check out the documentation and support guides on Mapbox.com/help.

NodeDC and DCjQuery Joint Meetup Tonight

Development Seed — 2012-02-20T00:00:00-08:00

Tonight, Monday, February 20 at 7:00 pm, we’re holding a NodeDC meetup at Fathom Creative at 1333 14th Street NW (at Rhode Island). This month we’re teaming up with the DCjQuery folks to bring together a bigger crowd who is interested in all things JavaScript. There are three lightning talks on the lineup:

Dylan Greene will present HTML Canvas and show how he’s using it on the drawing game DoodleOrDie.
Ryan Roemer will talk about async.js.
Jafar Amjad will present on making a Node.js multiplayer site, specifically one that uses a low amount of bandwidth per player and features lasers, gravity, and walk cycles via animated gif’s. Check out his early beta version for a preview.

It should be a fun time to meet Node.js, jQuery, and JavaScript developers, share experiences, and learn what everyone is up to. Grab a six pack or some snacks to contribute to the group, and come on out tonight at 7:00 pm.

NodeDC holds a meetup once a month, usually on the third Monday of the month. Watch the website and follow @NodeDC on Twitter for updates.

Young Professionals in Foreign Policy: Communicating About the Ongoing Famine

Development Seed — 2012-02-15T00:00:00-08:00

Tonight I’m joining Young Professionals in Foreign Policy and USAID’s FWD Campaign for a discussion on the continuing crisis in the Horn of Africa. The Director of USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, Mark Bartolini, will kick the event off with a keynote on the famine and USAID’s response. A panel will follow, which I’ll participate in to discuss the maps and data visualizations we developed as a part of the ongoing famine mapping work we’ve done with USAID, the World Food Programme, and ONE.org. Specifically I’ll highlight how critical data can be transformed into a map to become a powerful advocacy tool.

USAID Administrator Dr. Rajiv Shah first announcing the famine maps at the Social Good Summit in New York City.

Tonight’s overall objective is to continue to advance the conversation around the famine that was declared last summer in the Horn of Africa. As a part of its response, USAID released a series of maps as an integral piece of the FWD (Famine, War, and Drought) Campaign to raise public awareness about the crisis. We worked with USAID to release these maps, as well as with ONE.org on its advocacy campaign Where is the Hunger? and the World Food Programme to map their on the ground response operations.

Latest Horn of Africa map showing the December 2011 food insecurity estimates

From spreadsheet to map

All of these maps leveraged open data made publicly available by organizations to tell the complex story of this crisis. Drought conditions, food prices, and conflict were compounding factors leading to the famine. The key to effectively communicating its extent and impact involved creating visualizations that packaged the data in a consumable way. Spreadsheets don’t do this. Maps, on the other hand, can be incredibly powerful in conveying who is affected and to what scale - two key pieces to communicating about the famine.

The Young Professionals in Foreign Policy event is tonight (Wednesday, February 15) from 6:30 - 8:30 pm. While it is currently full, there’s a waitlist for those interested in attending.

Week in DC Tech: Social Media Week

Development Seed — 2012-02-13T00:00:00-08:00

It’s Social Media Week, and here in Washington, DC we’re joining other cities around the world to celebrate. Below are our event picks for the week, and I recommend you check out the full Social Media Week calendar to see which of the 10+ daily events you want to attend.

Tuesday, February 14

8:30 am

We Love DC: Head to Dupont Circle to check out this pop-up photo booth where OnomonoMEDIA and the People’s District will be asking people “what do you love about Washington?”. The exhibit will highlight the “wonderful and unique elements of DC” - from the monuments and history to food trucks and jumbo slice.

Wednesday, February 15

10:00 am - noon

Beyond the PDF: This event hosted by the Center for Digital Information will look at how policy and research organizations can better use technology, data, and data visualization tools to stretch the use and utility of their reports, whitepapers, books, and policy briefs.

6:00 pm

Digital Trivia Night: Pub trivia with a technical spin. Come test out your knowledge of technology minutiae with the chance to win a $100 bar tab.

7:00 pm

DC Tech Meetup: This month’s DC Tech meetup - always a packed event - will have five short demos of new platforms, and talks on social media by Macon Phillips from the White House and Joaquin Alvarado from American Public Radio.

Thursday, February 16

5:30 - 8:30 pm

Who was Really Behind Internet Blackout Day?: This panel discussion will look at who was behind the “Internet Blackout Day” to protest SOPA and PIPA and what caused the most impact. Happy hour planned for after the discussion.

6:30 pm

Refresh DC: This month’s meetup will tie into Social Media Week, with the art director from nclud talking about new approaches and best practices for social media design.

6:30 - 9:30 pm

Tech Cocktail’s DC Winter Mixer: Come out to meet technologists, investors, bloggers, and entrepreneurs over cocktails and find out the latest projects folks are working on.

This Weekend

9:00 am - 5:00 pm

RootsCamp: This two day unconference brings together organizers and campaigners to learn the latest techniques and strategies around getting their message out online, engaging their audience, and successfully communicating their message. Eric and DJ will be there showing folks how to make custom web maps with TileMill.

9:00 am - 6:00 pm

OpenStreetMap Hack Weekend: Come help improve OpenStreetMap this weekend. Just bring a laptop and be ready to hack on some core components, editors, documentation, data, and anything else that could use some love. Tom and AJ will be there to help from our team.

Week in DC Tech: February 6th

Development Seed — 2012-02-06T00:00:00-08:00

There is a lot happening in the technology scene this week in Washington, DC, with events on openness in government, R, and mobiles in international development. Add to the mix two storytelling events and some happy hours, and it’s a great week. Below is our roundup of events, and you can find a full calendar over at DC Tech Events.

Tuesday, February 7

7:00 - 9:00 pm

The Anecdote: Stories about Not Love: In preparation of Valentine’s Day - or in spite of it - come out for a night of storytelling about failed love, dating troubles, and overall bad romance. Danny Harris from the People’s District - whose stories we helped map - is one of the presenters.

Wednesday, February 8

9:00 - 10:00 am

Open Innovation: Tools to Solve Problems and Grow the Economy: At this event held by the Center for American Progress, exiting U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra will talk about his work pushing for open policies around innovation and how the government can stay on track - and open - moving forward.

Thursday, February 9

3:30 - 5:30 pm

Mobile Disconnect: Can Mobile Solutions Really Combat Global Poverty?: This panel discussion hosted by the New America Foundation will look at the potential of mobile phones aiding international development and political activism, and also the limitations in their use.

6:00 - 10:00 pm

ICT4Drinks in DC: After the Mobile Disconnect event, attendees and others in the international development and technology sectors will meet to continue the discussion over drinks. If you want to talk mobiles in development and pick the brains of presenters and attendees, check this out.

6:30 pm

R Lightning Talks: Want to dip your toe into a bunch of different topics around R? This month’s R user group will feature seven lightning talks on topics like R’s spatial tools, version control in Git, and webscraping with R.

Saturday, February 11

6:30 - 9:30 pm

Nerd Nite: Nerds in Love: Want to start your Saturday night by learning about the science of love, sexual attraction to objects, and frogs mixed with some drinks and live music? Then Nerd Nite at DC9 is your ticket.

Week in DC Tech: January 30th Edition

Development Seed — 2012-01-30T00:00:00-08:00

There are several interesting events happening this week in Washington, DC, from strategically using open data to improve response to climate change to mapping traditionally undocumented areas and slums to talking real-time data at Tech@State. See our roundup below for the events we’re hoping to attend this month, and find a full calendar over at DC Tech Events.

Tuesday, January 31

Noon to 1:30 pm

World Bank Climate Data Briefing: On the heels of opening up of a large climate dataset, the World Bank is hosting this discussion on how open data can help respond to climate change. This meeting is specifically focused on developers working with data and data visualizations, and climate change experts. Alex and Eric will be there to talk about the benefits of open data and how to release it in usable ways.

Wednesday, February 1

7:00 - 9:00 pm

GeoDC Meetup: This month’s meetup will look at mapping slums and other un ddocumented areas, with speakers presenting on the techniques they’ve successfully used to map areas in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, East Jerusalem, Cite Soleil, and more. Really looking forward to this one.

Thursday, February 2

7:00 - 9:00 pm

CocoaHeads Meetup: This meetup will feature two presentations from Apple developers and give you a chance to meet and talk with local developers building on the platform.

Friday, February 3

8:00 am - 5:00 pm

Tech@State: Real-Time Awareness: Access to real-time data and the ability to quickly process and analyze can tremendously help when responding to disasters and breaking events. Tech@State will look at how to deliver real-time data and use it effectively. Alex and I will be here, specifically interesting in talking about data visualizations.

Saturday, February 4

8:30 am - 4:00 pm

Tech@State Unconference: Following Friday’s event, this will be a hands on dive into using technology to help collect, filter, analyze, and visualize real-time data. Check it out if you want to work with some real data and code.

Announcing the MapBox Blog

Development Seed — 2012-01-30T00:00:00-08:00

As you’ve seen from the amount of mapping posts on this blog, we’re ramping up our investment in MapBox - our open source mapping tools backed by a cloud platform for sharing and embedding custom maps and beautiful worldwide maps. To capture this momentum and communicate about MapBox news, we just launched the MapBox Blog over at MapBox.com. Follow us there or via RSS and Twitter.

Moving forward, all MapBox news will be posted on MapBox.com instead of here. So if you’re following us on Twitter @developmentseed, now would be a good time to follow @mapbox too. Of course we will continue posting here on DevelopmentSeed.org/blog about our data visualization and open data strategy projects, Node.js development, and local technology events.

Week in DC Tech: January 23rd Edition

Development Seed — 2012-01-23T00:00:00-08:00

Interested in learning about Python, meeting other people behind tech startups, or just working into the night with friends? Check out our roundup of technology events in Washington, DC this week, and check out that full event calendar over at DC Tech Events.

Monday, January 21

8:45 pm

DC Nightowls Co-Working Group: Interested in brainstorming, bouncing ideas, hacking, or just working late night? Check out this meetup to get some work done and meet other productive people.

Tuesday, January 22

6:30 pm

DC Lean Startup Circle Meetup: Folks from local startups like UmbaBox, mphoria, and HelloWallet will talk about their strategies for reaching out to new customers and keeping them on board at this meetup.

7:00 pm

DC jQuery Meetup: This month the DC jQuery group is teaming up with the Selenium meetup to talk about testing suites like Jasmine and others.

Thursday, January 26

6:30 pm

Refresh DC: Want to learn more about what services are offered in the cloud, and what all the hype is about? Check out this month’s meetup for an introduction.

Saturday, January 28

11:00 am - 2:00 pm

Python Web Scraping 101 for Journalists: The good folks at the Sunlight Foundation are hosting this hacking how to, introducing the fundamentals of Python using a simple web scraping example. If you’ve been wanting to dive in or hone up on Python, you’ll want to check this out.

A Google Maps Alternative: Switch to MapBox

Development Seed — 2012-01-20T00:00:00-08:00

We just launched MapBox.com/switch, a walk-through showing how MapBox is much more than just a mapping API. Particularly when combined with open source libraries like Leaflet, MapBox provides an incredibly powerful alternative to big traditional providers. The goal of /switch is to show how you can get up and running with an open mapping stack supported by a scalable cloud infrastructure.

In addition to featuring the open source wins of the MapBox Platform, the campaign also highlights some price comparisons. Specifically we’re looking at Google Map’s new price increase for high-end users, which for many businesses that depend on maps, are potentially debilitating. While we continue to look at Google Maps as a powerful integration point for MapBox, and something we continue to support for layering under custom maps, some organizations need to exit Google maps all together to save resources and are looking for viable alternatives. With MapBox, you have options.

To be clear, though, we are not trying to make a one-to-one comparison. MapBox doesn’t have its own satellites orbiting or cars roaming cities. We are not in the business of managing routing information to provide driving directions nor do we currently have the geocoding infrastructure that Google does. But we are in the business of making fast and beautiful maps, and for many organizations incredible base maps at a fair and flexible price makes MapBox a real alternative to Google Maps. Check out our new custom OpenStreetMap base maps that we’re launching later this month.

Read more about how to switch to MapBox and reach out to us if you want to talk about custom pricing packages or longer term contracts.

GDAL 2.0 to Support MBTiles

Development Seed — 2012-01-20T00:00:00-08:00

GDAL, the library underlying nearly all major open source geospatial projects (it’s used in apps like QGIS, ArcGIS, and Google Earth), has gained MBTiles read support. This adds a big name to the list of MBTiles supporting implementations because GDAL shines at data exploration and format conversion. It means MBTiles will be easier to use from any application that uses GDAL, and the list is impressively long. Once GDAL 2.0 is released, this potentially means you’ll be able to open MBTiles files directly in applications like QGIS. But already with GDAL trunk you can do fancy things like:

Query remote mbtiles for their metadata:

$ gdalinfo /vsicurl/http://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/mapbox.geography-class.mbtiles | grep description

One of the example maps that comes with [TileMill](http://mapbox.com/tilemill/) - a bright and colorful world map that blends retro and high-tech with its folded paper texture and interactive flag tooltips.

Or turn Konstantin’s gorgeous Iceland Map into a single 1.5 GB image suitable for high resolution printing:

$ wget http://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/kkaefer.iceland.mbtiles
$ gdal_translate kkaefer.iceland.mbtiles iceland.tiff
Input file size is 16384, 16384
0...10...20...30...40...50...60...70...80...90...100 - done.
$ ls -lh *tiff
-rw-r--r--  1 dane  staff   1.0G Jan  8 18:12 iceland.tiff

Or even remotely lookup a temperature anomaly value for a given coordinate in the World Bank Climate Scenario A2 Map:

$ gdallocationinfo /vsicurl/http://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/worldbank-climate.wbc-temp-anom-a2.mbtiles -wgs84 2 49 -b 1
Report:
  Location: (5279P,11525L)
  Band 1:
    11549{"control_vals":"-1.90,-1.08,1.09,3.90,8.48,12.43,15.96,15.42,11.18,6.04,1.80,-1.11,-1.90","id":11549,"p10_vals":"-1.58,-0.09,1.85,4.70,8.60,13.81,17.82,17.62,13.58,6.83,2.19,-0.38,-1.58","p10_yr_anom":3,"p50_vals":"1.17,1.85,3.71,6.75,11.32,16.57,21.35,21.34,16.14,10.01,5.37,1.88,1.17","p90_vals":"4.28,5.05,6.68,9.34,13.67,19.06,24.62,25.00,19.31,12.18,7.59,5.43,4.28","p90_yr_anom":4.7}
    Value: 255

More details about GDAL’s MBTiles support are on its docs page.

This is brilliant. I noticed the addition two weeks ago in #gdal IRC and quickly realized it was Even Rouault (profile/blog) at work. He’s a true force of nature - an amazingly smart and focused developer and one of the lead maintainers of the GDAL project. This is a very key position now that the lead and founder of the project Frank Warmerdam has been hired by Google and his commits have understandably declined. In addition to helping maintain a huge project, Even seems insanely deft at adding new drivers overnight to the delight of programmers the world over.

So, thanks for this awesome feature Even, and thanks Frank and others for creating such a powerful library for developers like Even to build on. We notice :)

Open Climate Data Meeting with the World Bank

Development Seed — 2012-01-18T00:00:00-08:00

Over lunch on January 31, the World Bank is holding a meeting with developers and data and climate change experts to discuss how open data can help address some of the challenges of climate change. Eric and I will be there to talk open data best practices and specifically on our experience mapping open data for the World Bank and the Global Adaptation Institute.

This meeting comes on the heels of the COP 17/CMP 7 Climate Change Conference in Durban two months ago, where the World Bank released a series of climate data sets to improve climate and development decision-making. Now that this climate data is available to a broader audience, the World Bank is bringing together an overlapping community of development practitioners, climate change experts, and programmers to further explore how to use open data to improve decision making, planning, and communications. This meeting takes place in addition to the World Bank’s efforts to get a larger audience using its data through the ongoing Apps for Climate Challenge.

Eric and I are looking forward to discuss using open data with an eye toward visualizing it, specifically by creating compelling map-based visualizations like the climate change maps on climate4development.developmentseed.org. We’ll also show how easy it is to add more data to existing maps like this through overlays, to tell new and different stories with your data.

You can find more information about the event on the World Bank’s site, and rsvp to attend the event in person or online.

Projected temperature changes by the year 2100 according to one scenario.

Mapnik Creator Artem Pavlenko Joins the Team

Development Seed — 2012-01-18T00:00:00-08:00

Artem Pavlenko, the creator of Mapnik - the amazing map renderer at the heart of many open source mapping tools ranging from our map design studio TileMill to huge live updating datasets like OpenStreetMap - has joined the MapBox team. He comes on board after playing a critical role in the launch of MapQuest Open, which is based on open source Mapnik and OpenStreetMap data.

Artem is a incredible addition as we further grow the MapBox platform this year. Most recently he has been working with Dane porting TileMill to Windows.

Artem will continue to lead Mapnik’s core development - in fact his main work right now is focused on developing for Mapnik 3. All of this work will result in huge performance improvements for us, which will be critical as we build out our world base maps and further scale our platform. After years of coordinating together in the open source space, it is amazing to get to work together on the same team.

Mapping for Nonprofits at Tonight's NetSquared DC Meetup

Development Seed — 2012-01-17T00:00:00-08:00

Tonight’s NetSquared DC meetup will look at how nonprofits are using web maps and discuss emerging tools that are making custom mapping easier, more flexible, and more affordable. I’ll be there presenting on where we see the future of web mapping heading. I’ll specifically discuss the open source map design tool TileMill and how it allows users to quickly turn a spreadsheet of data into a beautiful, custom online map.

Speed, design, and usability are what really matter when communicating data, and custom maps are now a viable option for nonprofits of all budgets. I’ll highlight how three nonprofits have leveraged open source mapping tools to change the way they communicate, showing how A Wider Circle maps its furniture donors and recipients to better target its efforts, how ONE.org has used maps and data to boost public awareness of a humanitarian crisis, and how the urban history initiative People’s District maps its storytelling. Danny Harris from the People’s District will be joining me to talk more about their map tells the stories of DC.

Screenshot of ONE.org’s famine mapping presentation

Lastly I’ll give a sneak peek of our coming soon minimal OpenStreetMap baselayer, which serves as an alternative to the common Google baselayer map we’ve all seen a million times. InterAction will also be presenting tonight on how they use maps to help their member organizations connect and collaborate with the NGO Aid Map, made by our friends at Vizzuality and also powered by open source.

I’m looking forward to meeting with the local NetSquared community and helping more nonprofits communicate their data through smart maps and visualizations. TileMill is only getting easier to use, and with new $5 a month plans for MapBox Hosting, custom web mapping is in reach of a much larger audience.

Designing a Minimalist OpenStreetMap Baselayer for MapBox

Development Seed — 2012-01-17T00:00:00-08:00

I am designing a new minimal OpenStreetMap base map in TileMill to use with MapBox hosting platform’s map builder. The goal for the design is a general OpenStreetMap layer that can be used as a light, very subtle background for compositing further data on top of. Here is an early look at the features and design aspects I have been working on for the map.

I used the OSM Bright template as a starting point for the design and removed all color, choosing to limit the palette to light grays. For simplicity, most land use and land cover area types have been dropped, however wooded areas and parks remain and are indicated with subtle textures instead of color.

Label improvements

For city labels I’m making use of the ‘simple’ label placement logic new to Mapnik 2. With this method you can specify multiple placements for the renderer to attempt, and the label will be rendered in the first one where it fits. The result is more cities end up being labelled at low scales.

Improved label placement in the Northeast United States.

I’ve also created shield styles to show route numbers for major highways like I-95 at mid-level scales.

Road improvements

The style now includes more types of roads. Tracks have been added, as have pedestrian routes, bike paths, and bridleways, which are shown as dotted lines. Roads without general public access (for example private roads) are shown faded out.

The rendering of overlaying tunnels, streets, and bridges has also greatly improved, with most overlapping lines separated and stacked in the proper order.

Overlapping bridges in Boston

The tunnel and bridge improvements are one of the more significant changes. The method I used was inspired by the bridge handling in Michael Migurski’s excellent High Road project. The method involves pulling multiple copies of the same bridge or tunnel segment from the database in order to render the casing and fill. Road casing is something I normally handle in Carto with multiple symbolizers on the same object. But in the case of bridges where you are dealing with potentially many overlapping layers, it’s easier to control the rendering order with PostgreSQL’s ORDER BY than it is with Carto attachments. Some modifications to the ImpOSM import mapping were required in order to bring in the layer tag value from the OpenStreetMap data.

At first glance it might seem like I’ve removed the outlines from standard roads. What I’ve actually done is made the casing the same color as the land. Rather than a standard outline, this provides a pseudo-knockout border when roads pass over tunnels or land cover textures.

Trails cutting a path through a wooded area in Chicago.

This border is slightly wider trails, cycleways, and railways. These features are represented by thinner dashed lines, and a wider outline give them some breathing rooms from any background texture and also makes for nice-looking bridges.

Coming soon: OSM Bright

Many of the adjustments that I’ve made for this minimal style are things that can be pulled back into the OSM Bright template project. I’ll be working on doing this in the near future as I wrap up work on the minimal design. Keep an eye on GitHub for these improvements as well as our blog for information about when the minimal design will become available on MapBox.

MapBox for design

Try using TileMill to style your own data or pull in extracts from OpenStreetMap. If you are new, check out our documentation on mapbox.com/help and follow us on Twitter @MapBox - you can also sign up to our email newsletter for updates every few weeks. When you’re ready to share your maps, check out MapBox plans starting at just $5 a month.

Week in DC Tech: January 16th Edition

Development Seed — 2012-01-16T00:00:00-08:00

There’s a lot going on in the Washington, DC technology space this week with meetups on Node.js, nonprofit mapping, big data, SOPA, and more. Below is our roundup of the events, and you can find the full local calendar at DC Tech Events.

Monday, January 16

7:00 - 9:00 pm

NodeDC Meetup: Want to learn more about the high performance javascript engine that’s powering more and more data heavy sites and our set of MapBox tools? Come out for this meetup to learn more about node.js, see what’s being built with it, and meet local developers.

Tuesday, January 17

7:00 pm

Netsquared: Modern Mapping: We’re presenting at this month’s meetup talking about how nonprofits can use web maps to better communicate about their work, track operations, and connect people. We’ll also walk through how technical and non-technical users alike can go from a spreadsheet to an interactive web map in ten minutes using TileMill and MapBox tools.

Erlang Hack Night: Come out to hack on Erlang with other developers. This event will group two to three people of various coding levels together to address a common challenge while pair programming. It’s a great opportunity to improve your Erlang coding and grow the community.

Wednesday, January 18

10:00 am to Noon

Emergency DC Tech Meetup: There’s no doubt that if passed, SOPA will hugely impact the technology community. DC Tech is organizing people to go to the Hill to advocate against the measure.

6:30 pm

Big Data and Mongo DC Joint Meetup: The Big Data and Mongo meetup groups are teaming up this month with presentations on MongoDB and advice for monitoring big data systems.

Thursday, January 19

7:00 pm

ONA: Homicide Watch: This month ONA’s meetup will look at Homicide Watch, a website that covers every single homicide in Washington, DC from the criminal act until conviction. The site has received good attention for giving a voice to victims and for providing some of the most thorough crime coverage in the area.

NodeDC Highlight: The State of Node on Windows

Development Seed — 2012-01-16T00:00:00-08:00

Tonight I will present on the state of Node.js on the Windows platform at this month’s NodeDC meetup. We kick off at 7:00 pm at Stetson’s.

Node.js is the high performance javascript engine at the core of MapBox. Six months ago their team announced plans to support Windows with Microsoft’s direct help. This was exciting to us because it meant TileMill, our open source map design studio, could also potentially support Windows. In November when the first release of Node landed that included Windows support, we started scoping out what a TileMill port to Windows might look like. As you can see from Friday’s launch of Mapbox.com/Windows, it looks hot.

At tonight’s meetup I will talk about how to get started with Node on Windows, gotchas, and what to watch for in the future. Please RSVP if you can make it. You can also sign up for updates about TileMill on Windows as we get closer to launch.

The NodeDC meetups are held once a month and are open to everyone, with people of all levels of node.js and programming expertise welcome. Check out nodedc.github.com for more details, and follow @NodeDC on Twitter for updates.

TileMill Coming to Windows

Development Seed — 2012-01-13T00:00:00-08:00

We’re now only weeks away from launching version 0.9.0 of MapBox’s open source map design studio TileMill, which will run natively on Windows for the first time. This means that TileMill will now be a one-click install on three major computing platforms: Windows, Mac OS X, and Ubuntu Linux.

TileMill running natively in Windows 7.

The goal here is top notch performance. With a native port to Windows nothing can stand in the way of the blazing rendering speeds that TileMill is capable of when given full reign of the hardware. Watch the preview video of TileMill 0.9.0 on mapbox.com/windows and sign up to be notified when it’s ready for download.

Based on operating system usage data, the TileMill community will be growing very soon:

Windows User Base (Oct. 2011), Source: Wikimedia (Oct. 2011)

Node gains Windows support

TileMill is written in pure javascript using Node.js. Node has been cross-platform from the start, supporting a range of open source and commercial operating systems. But Windows was not originally on the list because the asynchronous networking at the core of Node (libev/libeio) only worked on UNIX systems. This meant TileMill could never support Windows natively.

But six months ago, the Node team announced that they would begin work on a Windows port with Microsoft’s direct help with the explicit target of easy installation and high performance. The first stable release of Node that included Windows support landed in November. I’ll be talking more about this at Monday’s Node.js meetup in Washington, DC.

TileMill ported to Windows

There were four main tasks on the road to a Windows version of TileMill:

Porting custom node C++ modules we’ve written for TileMill like node-sqlite3, node-zipfile, and node-mapnik to leverage the new Node cross-platform asynchronous networking library, libuv.
Building the latest Mapnik 2 development code and all its dependencies on Windows using a toolchain compatible with what the Node team is using (Visual Studio 2010).
Enhancing TileMill to use fully cross platform approaches to filesystem handling.
Designing a build system that can be semi-automated to make frequent releases sustainable.

We are excited that since late November, with the expert help from lead Mapnik developer Artem Pavlenko, we have achieved these tasks. Sign up for updates on our progress and to be one of the first users of TileMill on Windows.

StreetEasy Makes the Switch to MapBox from Google

Development Seed — 2012-01-12T00:00:00-08:00

StreetEasy.com just switched to MapBox.com hosting, setting them up to save $250,000 this year compared to paying Google’s new 2012 map API fees. More than just being a huge cost savings, the map they designed in house using OpenStreetMap data in TileMill and integrated on their site using Leaflet just looks sick and gives them nice editorial control over everything from neighborhood boundaries to what labels show up where, details that matter when your product (real estate) is all about location. With MapBox hosting’s compositing, they can add additional map layers without redoing their base map or seeing a performance hit. Sebastian Delmont, who leads the technical team at StreetEasy just blogged the details about the switch in “Good bye, Google Maps… thanks for all the fish”. I wanted to highlight a couple key excerpts, which hint to the much larger trend of a convergence of open data, open source, and a large field of mapping providers. This ain’t 2005 any more.

StreetEasy decided to build our own maps using, among other tools, OpenStreetMap, TileMill, MapBox and Leaflet, instead of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to Google. And yes, the money pushed us into doing it, but we’re happier with the result because we now control the contents of our maps. more

…

We did the math and came up with numbers that reminded me of Oracle licensing in 1999. Six, seven, eight hundred thousand dollars. We met with Google salespeople, expecting to negotiate better terms, and they were nice, and they offered us discounts, but only to about half of what we’ve calculated. more

In our opinion, their price was off by an order of magnitude. It’s very, very hard to work out a $2 CPM cost in any site’s business model, when most of the time, if you’re lucky, you’re making $1 CPM off your pages. And yes, StreetEasy does much better than that, and it would not have bankrupted us, but it would have also meant giving away a significant chunk of our profits. more

Pricing wise we think this will cost StreetEasy around $1,000 a month hosting with MapBox. They are set up with a $499 Premium account and are using the new pricing add-ons that we just rolled out. This is more than just talking about gig transfer, this is about compositing, analytics, and simple API integration, and here they are on MapBox.

A look at StreetEasy’s main NYC base layer in MapBox’s analytics.

The pricing conversation part is big, but what is bigger is how hot this map looks and how much that matters. Beautiful maps matter. It matters to both StreetEasy and it matters in general and our bet is that once people realize how easy it is going to be to make custom maps with TileMill and awesome open data sites like OpenStreetMap there is going to be a larger paradigm shift. As Sebastian said, “I think 2012 is going to be the year of the Open Map. And I’m happy to be part of the front lines.” And StreetEasy is not alone. This move follows on the heels of Neil Sweeney’s post on Fubra making the move to “Google Maps Free Alternatives” and more recently Ed Freyfogle from Nestoria blogging on “Why (and how) we’ve switched away from Google Maps” and in general fresh excitement around OpenStreetMap just rocking, like MIT’s post on “‘Wikipedia of Maps’ Challenges Google”. Just today Sean Larkin from ThinkShout, a creative open source team that does a lot of environmental work out in Portland captured what this shift means for even small NGOs.

While beautiful maps have been a staple of the web for the last decade, development of highly-customized maps historically has been expensive and has required a very specialized skill set and tools…Fortunately, the advent of HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, and other modern web technologies has paved the way for new, open source, cross-platform compliant mapping technologies to develop stylish and interactive maps. more

This market here could be huge. Google has been saying that they are only going to be charging 0.38% of users that are over their TOS limits - but that is still 4,000 people based on estimates from BuiltWith.com, which has tracked 1 million sites using Google maps. Market wise this breaks down to: 19.7% news/media, 14% businesses, 10% shopping, 8% travel and 5% government.

Like I said last week when I blogged about our investment priorities for the year, 2012 is going to be awesome.

From Google Maps to Open Source With MapBox and Leaflet

Development Seed — 2012-01-12T00:00:00-08:00

Switching from the Google Maps API to an open source library like Leaflet gives you the ability to choose between new, open, and less expensive mapping alternatives like MapBox, MapQuest Open, and OpenStreetMap.

Since releasing our API connector Wax and documenting the MapBox API in its totality, we’ve paid special attention to making sure that MapBox maps work in numerous clients - Modest Maps, Leaflet, Polymaps, OpenLayers and even the Google Maps API v3. We’ve been able to do this because the entire specification is open source, including our interactivity code, and because we provide something that Google doesn’t: direct tile access.

While you can use TileJSON to automatically configure our maps, it’s just a shortcut to adding a normal layer to a mapping API. It’s simple to use MapBox tiles without using any code from MapBox - so it’s also easy to try out different tile providers to find the one that best fits your usage and budget. Leaflet is a great place to start in making the jump from Google because it’s very similar to the Google Maps API.

Creating a basic map with Google Maps:

var map = new google.maps.Map(document.getElementById('map_canvas'), {
  center: new google.maps.LatLng(51.505, -0.09),
  zoom: 8,
  mapTypeId: google.maps.MapTypeId.ROADMAP
});

and in Leaflet:

var map = new L.Map('map', {
    center: new L.LatLng(51.505, -0.09),
    zoom: 8,
    layers: new L.TileLayer('http://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/mapbox.world-bright/{z}/{x}/{y}.png')
});

Markers and overlays in Leaflet

Unlike Modest Maps, the nano-sized framework we use for MapBox Hosting’s embed functionality, Leaflet supports an array of markers and polygon overlays very similar to Google Maps. There are custom icons, and you can bring in your GeoJSON for polygon overlays.

For large datasets and powerful styling controls, TileMill is unbeatable, but smaller dynamic data can work really well in Leaflet - and often better than it does with the Google Maps API. One example of this is StreetEasy, a real estate aggregator that just made the switch from Google Maps to custom MapBox maps.

Adding a marker in the Google Maps API looks like:

var marker = new google.maps.Marker({
    position: new google.maps.LatLng(51.505, -0.09),
    map: map,
    title:'Hello World!'
});

And in Leaflet it isn’t much different:

var marker = new L.Marker(new L.LatLng(51.505, -0.09));
marker.bindPopup('Hello, world!');
map.addLayer(marker);

Try out Leaflet

If you’re looking to experiment with alternatives to Google Maps, Leaflet’s a great way to go. It gives you flexibility between tile providers, a rich feature set, and unlike the Google Maps API it’s BSD-licensed open source code. For help working with Leaflet and MapBox, just ask us on the MapBox support site.

MapBox for fast, reliable custom map tile hosting

In addition to your data markers and polygons rendered through Leaflet, you can add in layers of map tiles for a custom base map, or additional features like restaurants, transit stops, or neighborhood boundaries. Try using TileMill to style your own data or pull in extracts from OpenStreetMap. When you’re ready to share your maps, check out MapBox plans starting at just $5 a month. MapBox includes server-side compositing so your maps will be fast even as you add more layers and work well on mobiles.

Geo DC Meetup Tonight: User Experience

Development Seed — 2012-01-11T00:00:00-08:00

The first Geo DC meetup of the year is tonight, January 11, at 7:00 pm at Stetson’s Bar and Grill, and will focus on the user experience behind maps. Our cartographer AJ will present on the design and user experience of maps integrated into websites, such as the World Bank’s climate change maps, and map-based web interfaces like you see on the Opportunity Index. He’ll run through key points to keep in mind when designing online maps and interfaces that users enjoy, understand, and get more meaning out of.

Tim Deegan from Forum One will talk about how map design has evolved over the years and touch on some of the latest thinking in user experience, and Andy Chosak from the Mobility Lab will talk about designing Transit Near Me, an application that shows transit services near your current location.

The Geo DC meetup happens once a month, usually on the first Wednesday of the month. The next meetup will be on February 1 and will focus on slum mapping. For updates, join the meetup group and follow @geonerdsdc on Twitter.

See you tonight!

Week in DC Tech: January 9th Edition

Development Seed — 2012-01-09T00:00:00-08:00

After a few slow weeks around the holidays, the DC tech space is heating back up with events on map design, startup networking, and social events like the monthly Nerd Nite. Below are our picks for the week, and you can find a full calendar at DC Tech Events. Have a great week!

Wednesday, January 11

Noon

Hackers and Founders Lunchtime Meetups: This brand new meetup brings technology creators and investors together in small groups over lunch. It’s organized by the folks from the Hacker News meetup group and powered by Wednesdays.com.

7:00 - 9:00 pm

Geo DC Meetup: This month the Geo Meetup will look at the experience of using maps, with lightning talks on designing intuitive maps, how maps have changed over the years, and special considerations needed in transit maps. This meetup always draws a enthusiastic crowd of folks working in GIS, geography, and map and is a great opportunity to meet people working in the field and learn about what they are making.

Saturday, January 14

6:30 - 9:30 pm

Nerd Nite: The Republican primaries have brought religion to the forefront of politics, but one question not being answered is why isn’t America more secular. This month’s Nerd Nite will answer this, plus why some smart people box and the environmental impact of chicken farming. In between talks, you can listen to music from local artist Adrian Krygowski and of course grab some drinks.

Announcing New MapBox Add-on Packages for Power Users

Development Seed — 2012-01-09T00:00:00-08:00

In addition to MapBox.com’s growing customer base, our users’ hosted maps are scaling in popularity and complexity. Today we’re announcing aggressive pricing to add more storage and transfer bandwidth to your MapBox Premium account. The idea is to provide simple, transparent pricing add-on packages on demand, with no long term commitments. This flexibly and scalability lets your account grow and change just like your business, in affordable $50 increments that you can turn on or off on a monthly basis.

MapBox accounts include ample storage for you to share interactive data visualizations and custom base layers that you create with your own data. Now as your storage needs grow, you can add additional packs of 10GB for just $50 each per month.

When your map embeds go viral or you integrate them into a website or mobile app with high traffic, you can affordably scale up your MapBox hosting account by adding extra sets of transfer bandwidth at just $50 a month per 50GB. You get the ability to host custom interactive web maps at a fraction of what large search engine companies charge.

Increase your storage and bandwidth amounts by going to the Account tab in MapBox Hosting, and scale up or down as your needs change.

Extremely competitive pricing

MapBox’s sole business is to help you design and share fast, beautiful interactive maps for the web and mobile devices. As a result, we built a rock-solid hosting infrastructure that can scale for the most popular sites online at an incredibly affordable price. Concretely, 1,000 additional map views beyond your account’s included transfer bandwidth will cost you about 32 cents. Google charges $4.00 for each additional 1,000 map views for stock public maps, and more for Premier accounts. That’s a savings of over 12 times with MapBox, let alone all the additional features you get like compositing, analytics, embed widgets, web-based and offline mobile support, and complete design control using your own data. And there is no long-term contract to sign — just scale up or down your storage and bandwidth allotments monthly as your needs change.

Committed to open source and open data

In additional to fair pricing, MapBox comes with no restrictions on how and where you share your maps. You can make custom maps using your own data in both public and private applications at no additional cost. TileMill, our map design studio, is completely free and open source, so there is no additional cost for using one of our base maps or designing your own from scratch.

We are also committed to providing the best data for maps by supporting the OpenStreetMap community. You can add an OpenStreetMap layer under your own maps for street level detail. Our MapBox world maps feature clean world maps for data overlays as well as satellite and terrain imagery from public sources like NASA and Natural Earth.

Make the switch to MapBox

It’s easy to migrate your mapping stack to MapBox. Check out our extensive documentation at MapBox.com/help to get familiar with our services and the MapBox API. We offer our premium subscribers 24-hour turn around on any questions and can help you prepare for a migration to MapBox - just post a note at support.mapbox.com. Learn more about our Premium services, and take the tour. If you have questions about what kind of hosting will suit your needs or want to get on the phone to learn more, just contact our team.

Week in DC Tech: New Year's Edition

Development Seed — 2012-01-03T00:00:00-08:00

Happy New Year! We hope everyone enjoyed the holidays and is ready for an exciting 2012. The technology scene is coming back from break, with several interesting events happening this week and a full schedule for the rest of January. Below is a roundup of ones that caught our eye, and you can see the full calendar at DC Tech Events.

Tuesday, January 3

7:00 pm

DC Python meetup: This month’s meetup will look at the Python hosting service Heroku, with folks from their team presenting on the cloud application platform and its services.

7:00 pm

Book Club: Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers: The Story of Success”: This monthly women’s book club will discuss one of Malcolm Gladwell’s interesting reads - Outliers: The Story of Success, which has applications to everything from business to work life to child rearing. Head out to La Madeleine in Bethesda if you’d like to join the conversation.

Saturday, January 7

9:00 am - 5:45 pm

UXCamp DC 2012: This day long unconference is all about user experience - whether that’s on the web, on a mobile, or in taking action in the real world. Come out to share what you know and learn from other UX folks, bar camp style.

Major MapBox Investments Coming In 2012

Development Seed — 2012-01-02T00:00:00-08:00

We could not be more excited to kick off 2012. This year will be huge for us in nearly every way as we further grow the MapBox platform to let anyone make fast, beautiful, interactive web maps using their own data. We’ve expanded our team with some amazing new talent and put together an incredible roadmap of new features and services. This year we will release TileMill on Windows, enable live updates for maps, produce beautiful world maps using the best open data available from OpenStreetMap and other public sources, and ship a blazingly fast hardware appliance for power users. After a year of rapid development and expansion, MapBox is a faster, more beautiful, and well priced alternative to traditional web mapping services.

Staying focused on speed and beautiful design

Speed and beautiful design are at the heart of MapBox. Beautiful maps start with a flexible, easy to use design studio. TileMill is cartography for the web, from the ground up. Working with familiar CSS-like styling and a layers interface, TileMill lets you produce completely custom world maps, highly-detailed street maps, geographic data visualizations, and everything in between. MapBox maps made with TileMill can show custom styles or data for each zoom level and have interactive overlays and actions. This year, we will finish TileMill 1.0 to stabilize new features with an extensible plug-in system.

In addition to great design, speed and usability are essential to successful web maps. MapBox Hosting is like YouTube for maps with deep level application integration. Your maps are sharable by URL or embed code. We have an advanced API to integrate your maps with any website or application. You can stack up layers of maps to create a composite — this makes it really easy to add on your custom data layer of shaded areas or location points on top of a pre-made base map. We provide detailed analytics on how and when your maps are being viewed. And all of this is built into an ultra-fast, highly-available, and scalable cloud hosting environment.

For offline map use, we have a free iPad app so you can take your maps with you, whether you need to work in areas without connectivity or just want a really elegant presentation tool.

This is the core MapBox platform. Design, share, and interact with fast, beautiful custom web maps. We believe that the web is meant to be interactive and maps should be immersive and unique, not static or stock.

We appreciate greatly the support of our clients in this first year too, many of whom share their maps publicly on MapBox Hosting.

Big investment plans for 2012

In the first half of this new year, MapBox will further scale investing in the core platform and deliver several new features and services that shatter the standards of web mapping.

TileMill for Windows

Just two months ago, after Node.js added native Windows support, we started testing and porting TileMill to a native Windows application. We plan to release a beta version this quarter. Having TileMill as a one click installer for Windows will dramatically grow our base of users. We have staffed up in the past two months to help support the influx of new mappers, and are spending January doing a clean-up and rewrite of our core documentation. We are thrilled to open MapBox to PC users. If you are interested in testing out TileMill on Windows, sign up to be notified as soon as we launch!

Live map updates

Part of the reason MapBox maps are so fast is that they store all of the geographic data in their final format. We have been carefully developing a way to preserve this speed while allowing changes in data to automatically update maps. We are close to launching on demand map updates on the MapBox platform. From being able to detect changes in a Google spreadsheet to querying databases and APIs, we will be releasing a new version of TileMill that lets you plug into more remote data sources and upload the updated maps directly to your MapBox Hosting account when data changes. Again, all of this is going to happen in TileMill and will be a simple add on service to our existing hosting plans. We are still working out pricing, but plan on this being affordable enough for small NGOs and scalable for large sites that we hope will start hosting with MapBox. Sign up for the newsletter to hear the latest and be an early TileMill tester when we launch.

Custom world maps

We want MapBox to be the best option for organizations seeking an alternative to Google Maps and its new and expensive usage fees. We already offer faster maps with radically flexible design control. To close the last gap, we are currently designing several global base layers all using OpenStreetMap and other open data. We are specifically targeting media organizations, which have highly integrated Google Maps in their websites, but anyone will be able to leverage these maps. Designing custom OSM base maps is not an original idea, and there are clearly more and more beautiful base maps coming out each day. Awesome companies like MapQuest are already aggressively playing in this space, offering no preset limits on their free API, which we already make available in MapBox Hosting’s street level map feature. We are focused on design flexibility and making it easier for people to work with this data in a performant way. We will be blogging more details about this in the coming weeks and will share some of our designs then. If you are thinking about switching from Google maps and want an early preview of where we are going, please email us at info@MapBox.com to set up a time to talk.

Hardware for power users

Built for speed and designed for helping teams collaborate, the MapBox Appliance is a fully supported, pre-configured map generation and sharing server. It’s designed for a range of use-cases - from powering teams in an office working on large projects in need of the fastest map generation possible, to field sites in need of a portable appliance for mapping on-the-ground with low or no internet connectivity.

We will blog more details later this month, when we plan on sharing the first designs publicly. Once we publish final support and pricing options, we will start taking pre-orders for shipping in April.

Creative, disruptive mapping

MapBox’s ultimate goal is to build a sustainable space for being creatively disruptive. Further development on TileMill and MapBox Hosting, shipping hardware, and maintaining dynamic world base layers are all huge undertakings, and together they will blow the doors off of the web mapping space. We could not be happier with the progress we’ve made over the last year building the MapBox platform. We can’t wait to begin work on these new initiatives and look forward to seeing the ground-breaking new visualizations our clients create this year.

To learn more about MapBox take the tour, follow us on Twitter @MapBox, and sign up to our email newsletter for updates every few weeks.

Happy Holidays!

Development Seed — 2011-12-23T00:00:00-08:00

Happy holidays! It’s been a fantastic year. We’ve had a blast working with the international development, mapping, node.js, and open source communities, and can’t wait to keep at it coming year.

To celebrate the holidays and get ready for the coming year, our office will be closed from December 24 until January 2. See you next year!

Week in DC Tech: December 19th Edition

Development Seed — 2011-12-19T00:00:00-08:00

It’s a quiet week in the technology space with the holidays right around the corner. There are a still a couple fun tech (and other) events out there as you’ll see in the roundup below, but otherwise enjoy the holidays and stay tuned for more in the New Year!

Monday, December 19

8:30 - 11:30 pm

DC Nightowls Co-Working Group: Want to work into the night surrounding by others pounding away? The DC Nightowls group brings together folks to work, brainstorm, and bounce ideas off each other after hours.

Tuesday, December 20

6:30 pm

Games Gateway at the National Zoo: The National Zoo always does it up for the holidays with their annual Zoo Lights celebration, and this year they’re adding a conservation themed scavenger hunt to the mix. Come out for the game, holiday lights, drinks, and of course the animals.

New Status Site for MapBox Hosting

Development Seed — 2011-12-19T00:00:00-08:00

Check out our new status site - mapbox.com/status - for MapBox Hosting. The site monitors for any disruptions across our entire service, allowing MapBox users to quickly and clearly learn about any problems.

The site will be used in conjunction with our @MapBox Twitter account to increase transparency about any problems that arise and the steps our team is taking to correct them quickly. The site is hosted with GitHub pages, separate from our other infrastructure, so it can reliably remain online through outages that could cause some parts of our site to be unavailable.

The page is designed to inform you about the overall system status at first glance. When the header is green, everything is normal and your maps are being delivered at high speed. A yellow header indicates a minor service disruption. Non-critical parts of the service may be delayed or unavailable, but all maps are still online. A red header indicates a major service disruption that may be affecting our ability to deliver maps. If the header is ever yellow or red, it means our team is working hard to bring the service back to full operation as quickly as possible. We’ll post technical details about the outage and what our team is doing to resolve it to the incident log.

If you ever have trouble reaching the MapBox service, check the status site first. If there isn’t anything posted, the site provides instructions on how to report outages to our team by sending an email to status@mapbox.com, which gets routed into a system that notifies us of critical issues immediately. If the problem isn’t an emergency, you can start a discussion with our support team at support.mapbox.com.

We’re dedicated to maintaining high availability on MapBox Hosting, and this site will help us proactively communicate with customers in the event of a problem.

Not a MapBox subscriber? Sign up to start hosting your custom maps or take the MapBox tour to learn how it works.

Leveraging Data to Improve Social Inclusion at TechCamp Bucharest

Development Seed — 2011-12-16T00:00:00-08:00

We just wrapped up two days of mapping strategy and TileMill training with a group of Romanian NGOs supporting the country’s Roma minority at the State Department’s TechCamp Bucharest. The NGOs strategized ways to share data and publish better data on the Roma population to leverage in discussions with local governments around social inclusion plans and better provision of public services.

But NGOs need more accurate data than what is currently available - even basic data like how many Roma are in the country is highly questioned. According to the 2002 Census, there are 535,140 Roma people in Romania, accounting for 2.5% of the country’s population. These estimates are thought to be wildly low because Roma’s generally do not declare their background in the Census. Several NGOs we worked with quoted wide ranging estimates from 1 to 2 million, with that taking into account large population decreases starting in 2007 after Romania joined the European Union and emigration increased.

A look at the questionable 2002 Romanian census figures on the Roma population percentages in each county.

The main focus in breakout sessions was on getting better data to make better data driven decisions. “We are making decisions based on numbers that are not correct” emphasized Elena Mihalache, Public Policy and Advocacy Senior Advisor at the Roma Civic Alliance of Romania. This need was furthered by Ana Ivasiuc, Research Coordinator for Agentia Impeuna, who said “we need better data on housing and infrastructure in Roma communities. Without good data we can’t gage what better services are needed.” While the country just completed a new Census this year with official population figures expected in May 2012, ethnicity data is not expected to be released until 2013 and the NGOs we are working with expressed little confidence that the data will better count the Roma.

What makes this especially complicated is that the lack of data can be self perpetuating. “This false data problem is a symptom - we need to make people aware that being Roma is not a bad thing,” says Ana Ivasiuc. But getting over stereotypes requires good data to dispel folklore. NGOs are working to help more Roma students graduate high school - but it is hard to solve a problem when the causation of dropping out of school are based on data. For example, it is often suspected that Roma girls drop out of school because of early marriage, but this is based mostly on interviews with teachers. “The lack of data perpetuates the stereotypes” Elena added. “There is a little running around our tail in order to map the data we need to correct the data.”

TechCamp ended today with the Roma NGOs sketching out plans of how they will better share data together to help fill the wider data void. The group presented their action plan to TechCamp’s lead facilitator Noel Dickover and asked the State Department to help them fund a new data collection push that was all focused on open data. I look forward to see how their efforts work to improve data moving forward.

NodeDC Meetup Tonight at 7:00 pm

Development Seed — 2011-12-14T00:00:00-08:00

Today - Wednesday, December 14 - starting at 7:00 pm at Stetson’s is the NodeDC meetup. These monthly meetups bring together developers to talk about node.js - the platform for building fast, scalable applications that we use for our data and mapping sites. It’s a great opportunity to share what you are working with in node.js, find out how others are using it, and get to know other developers in the city. Tonight there will be three lightning talks:

Ian will talk about how we deploy node apps here at Development Seed, flying through components like SSL, Upstart, Nginx, logging, and monitoring.
Will will talk about node-inspector, a browser-based node debugging tool that allows you to set breakpoints, step though code, and edit code while a process is running.
Ray Daly will talk about concept of TTD for APIs using node and hopes to get feedback from the group.

The NodeDC meetups are held once a month on the third Wednesday of the month, with next month’s on Wednesday, January 18, so mark your calendars. These meetups are open to everyone, with people of all levels of node.js and programming expertise welcome.

Check out nodedc.github.com for more details, and follow @NodeDC on Twitter for updates.

MapBox for iPad 1.7 Released

Development Seed — 2011-12-13T00:00:00-08:00

The latest version of our MapBox for iPad app has hit the iOS App Store! This release has both visible and under-the-hood changes that I’d like to highlight in more detail.

Legend support

The biggest new feature is map legend support. TileMill, our map design studio, supports HTML-based legends when creating maps, and our Wax library makes it easy to display legends on MapBox Hosting and self-hosted TileStream servers. Now the iPad joins the club with first-class support for viewing multiple map legends when working with layers.

Legends stack on top of each other in the same order that their corresponding map layers are stacked, allowing for rearrangement to suit a particular presentation. Additionally, the entire legend interface can be collapsed with a simple left swipe on the content, and the state is remembered between launches of the app.

We spent a lot of time refining successive variations of the legend presentation interface, ultimately arriving at what we think is the best possible approach - simple, lightweight, and without extraneous user interface elements. In short, the interface is the legend, and nothing more.

Templating changes

Following up on our release a few weeks ago of Mustache-based tooltip templating in TileMill, we’ve brought this to MapBox for iPad as well. Generally, you won’t be creating these templates manually, but if you do, be sure to see the TileMill manual section on project settings. The main advantage here is that the HTML in tooltips and legends is sanitized for security reasons, which mostly impacts map embeds and other uses on the web. However, the iPad needs to display these, too, and does in fact render them as HTML in the app.

iCloud backup management

Last month we blogged about Apple’s issue, then resolution, with developers and iCloud backups. The latest version of MapBox for iPad now supports Apple’s new setting, as of iOS 5.0.1, for excluding files from cloud-based device backups. If you have a large amount of maps and other data in your MapBox app, you might want to visit the Settings app and tell MapBox not to backup your documents to iCloud in order to save some cloud storage space.

Other tweaks

We made a variety of other small changes and fixes to the app as well:

Network-based tile images are no longer cached by default, which improves performance in most cases. This can be changed in a new setting.
Removed (obsolete) layer type indication in MapBox Hosting previews.
Fixed a bug where browsing MapBox Hosting albums could show empty account names in certain situations.
Fixed a bug where entering an empty custom TileStream server name would erroneously validate as reachable.
Made some slight usability tweaks to the map snapshot save interface.
Added a setting to enter a custom MapBox Hosting server for debugging purposes.

Lastly, this version of the app now requires iOS 5 at a minimum. Since all iPads, first- or second-generation, can run iOS 5 and can ugprade for free, we decided to streamline development and take advantage of the latest technologies developed by Apple by dropping support for iOS 4.

As always, you can download MapBox for iPad from the App Store for free, and you can connect with us on Twitter at @MapBox.

Development Seed Holiday Party 2011

Development Seed — 2011-12-13T00:00:00-08:00

We celebrated the end of an amazing year last week with egg nog, several cases of beer and wine, and a barbecue feast from Rocklands. A homemade ornament contest and several heated rounds of foosball rounded out a spectacular night. Below are a few photos and you can see all the fun over on Flickr. A big thanks to Alex for photographing as usual! For some history, check out photos from our past holiday parties: 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006.

Dinner table

Bonnie prepping the spread

Eric’s all meat plate

Will

Jeff, Ian, DJ, Tristen, Saman, and Erica playing foosball

Young, Jeff, and Alex

Dave and Itir

Young

Jeff

Ian and Eric

Tom and Sean

Saman, AJ, and Tristen

Ornament of Dave, made by Tom

Ornament of Eric, made by Nate

The aftermath

Week in DC Tech: December 12th Edition

Development Seed — 2011-12-12T00:00:00-08:00

As the end of the year nears, the local technology community continues to organize some great events. This week there are events on node.js, the platform for building fast, scalable applications that we use for our data and mapping sites, open journalism, and longform reading, plus a party thrown by the startup folks at Proudly Made In DC. Our roundup is below, and check out DC Tech Events for more meetups happening around town.

Monday, December 12

5:00 pm

Panel on Open Journalism: The Online News Association is hosting this panel on Open Journalism to talk about bringing transparency to the field and how to change the existing culture to be more open.

Wednesday, December 14

7:00 - 9:00 pm

NodeDC Meetup: This month’s node.js meetup will include three quick lightning talks on deploying node apps, the browser-based node debugging tool node-inspector, and the concept of TTD for APIs using node. If you want to learn some quick tricks with node.js, meet other local developers, and learn why node.js is gaining in popularity, come out to this meetup.

Thursday, December 15

5:00 - 8:00 pm

ProudlyMadeInDC Birthday Party: Proudly Made in DC - the startup network connecting and promoting local entrepreneurs and technologists - is celebrating one year in operation by throwing a party. Check it out to learn about local startups and meet the people behind them.

6:00 pm

The State of Reading: Want the latest scoop on online readers like the Kindle and iPad, and read it later services like the excellent Instapaper? At this meetup, Will Mitchell from Washington City Paper and Longform.org will discuss the state of longform reading looking at both the technology and journalism sides.

7:00 pm

NetSquared: Leveraging Video for Social Change: This month’s NetSquared meetup will look at how nonprofits can leverage video for social change, with presentations by the filmmaker behind Choosing Prevention and an online communications strategist.

TileMill 0.7.2 Released: Save and Style, Improved Autocompletion, Performance

Development Seed — 2011-12-12T00:00:00-08:00

The recent TileMill 0.7.2 release adds new features to the map design tool that make it easier to get started making maps quickly. There’s a new ‘Save & Style’ button that lets you add a new layer and style it automatically. TileMill now saves projects automatically allowing for new data to appear instantly on the map, making TileMill an even better tool for quickly exploring new datasets. Finally, we’ve written elegant default styles that serve as great examples for learning Carto, the TileMill stylesheet language. This video walks through these new features.

We’ve made the TileMill workflow smoother in other areas as well. Choosing a file for a new layer now automatically fills out the required id field with an appropriate name. The Carto tab-based autocompletion we announced in TileMill 0.7.0 has been expanded to include smart completion of variables, properties, keywords, and selectors - and completing all of them in context-sensitive ways. To help figure out what properties describe, we’ve added tooltips to the style editor so hovering over raster-mode will show its documentation.

For advanced mapmakers, there are some more improvements. Default projects now use Natural Earth 1.4 data, so they correctly represent South Sudanese borders, and tweaks in the color palette and validation code have made basic TileMill functionality like project listing and editing large stylesheets faster than ever.

Download the new version of TileMill to start using these new features to design your custom maps, and take a look at the full changelog. We’re looking forward to hearing questions, feedback, and bugs at support.mapbox.com.

Getting Around the Same Table

Development Seed — 2011-12-09T00:00:00-08:00

It was awesome to see so many people involved in Desarrollando Latino América hackathons last weekend, which simultaneously took place across six countries in Latin America. I was in Mexico City’s sprint along with 50+ folks who camped out at CitiVox’s office, many of them for the full 30 hour sprint. While I was officially there to judge the apps, I spent the full two days hanging out with everyone, moving around from table to table and seeing what all the build teams were doing.

Talking about the MapBox API and integration for their CrossMatch app. The Innku team would ultimately win the apps competition.

Sitting around the table together and just being in the same room is a big deal. This builds community and capacity, which is the real value of these kinds of events. Just watching how other teams overheard what folks were working on - like “Oh, you are using Wax with Modest or Leaflet?” - and seeing cross team collaboration shows how being in the same room together and learning from each other creates an environment to co-create. In addition to tech folks learning from tech folks, in the case of Mexico there was an exciting mix of NGOs and tech folks. Tech folks learned more context about the open data space while NGOs got to see how good tech teams build and launch.

As the open data space gains fans we need to start taking a critical look at who is really using open data in their operations and then look at ways to grow this base. Our work especially in the international development space continues to show that there are not enough NGOs using open data. This is a real lost opportunity. We can do better development through better data and I am again and again seeing that the first step needs to be more data capacity and more technical knowledge. It is not always sexy work nor as easy as just running an apps competition, but has real potential to help us grow a base of real data users.

Using Maps to Assess the Global Malaria Burden

Development Seed — 2011-12-08T00:00:00-08:00

I just got back from the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene annual meeting where I presented prior research on mapping insecticide-treated bednets and community coverage in western Kenya. To show where bednets are really needed in Kenya and globally, I created a quick visualization to of the global malaria burden around the world.

Mapping like this should be a component of all research reports and in any public dissemination of results and data as it quickly and accurately communicates findings. It was good to see the wide variety of data visualizations utilized by scientists and practitioners at ASTMH to report their latest findings and evaluations of programs. The temperature and precipitation maps released last week by the World Bank have shown that data visualization can be highly interactive, graphically appealing, and extremely fast (and if you make maps read AJ’s great post on design decisions). Reporting research models, results, or evaluations using new data visualizations can generate new ways of thinking and can broaden the reach of the report.

In the malaria map I made, I took an open data set - made publicly available by the Malaria Atlas Project - used PostGIS to categorize the data into four scale groups, and created a custom style using TileMill, our open-source map design studio. In addition to designing the map in TileMill, the interactive and embed functions are provided by MapBox Hosting.

A global map like this gives users the ability zoom in - and then grab it and embed it elsewhere - on regional views like the one above, but still have the capability to zoom out and see a global extent.

To give TileMill a try for making maps like this, you can download it for free here, and find support and documentation on how to use it at MapBox.com.

Nonprofit Mapping Showcase at Tonight's Geo DC Meetup

Development Seed — 2011-12-07T00:00:00-08:00

Tonight’s Geo DC meetup will look at how nonprofits are using maps to streamline operations, coordinate with the people they serve and other practitioners, and improve their work. People from four different nonprofits - with focuses ranging from international development to reproductive health to helping lift DC families out of poverty to the global environment - will present on specific ways that they use maps in their work. Presentations will include:

Shiv Ramachandran from InterAction will show off NGO Aid Map, an online map that improves coordination betweens NGOs working in the same towns and countries.
Mark Bergel from DC-based A Wider Circle will show how they map their operations to improve their outreach efforts to collect furniture and other household donations from those who have them and deliver them to people without.
Gina Rumbolo from Population Action International will present a map of population and climate change hotspots.
Robin Kraft will talk about how the environmental thinktank World Resources Institute uses maps to communicate its data.

The meetup will start at 7:00 pm tonight (Wednesday, December 7), with presentations starting at 7:30 pm, and will be held at the upstairs bar at Stetson’s.

The Geo DC group meets monthly, usually on the first Wednesday of the month. You can join the meetup group for updates.

Inter-American Development Bank Raising Awareness of Open Source and Open Data in Tourism

Development Seed — 2011-12-06T00:00:00-08:00

Eric is in Punta del Este, Uruguay for the Inter-American Development Bank MICTTing conference to discuss how open source technology and open data can improve the international tourism industry and specifically sustainable tourism. Today he presented on this with Javier de la Torre from Vizzuality, focusing on offering concrete examples of open source tools attendees can use immediately to improve their services.

Much of this presentation centered on interactive maps, which is particularly relevant to the tourism industry given the geo nature of much of its services, with both Eric and Javier showing what is possible to do with open source tools like TileMill and CartoDB. Tomorrow Eric will be on hand to walk attendees through how to use TileMill to design fast, interactive maps and further discuss how they can be used to improve tourism services.

More than just presenting together, we are excited to be working more closely with Vizzuality. Their team gets how open source and open data can change international development. We will be collaborating a lot more as we continue to push hard in this thought space.

The MICTTing conference brings together people working in tourism and technology to work together. While in the past the conference has primarily focused on proprietary tools from Microsoft, this year the Inter-American Development Bank included open source solutions as well, identifying that often they are more relevant to the needs of tourism operators around the world. To get a feel for the conference, view the full agenda and read Javier’s blog post on our presentation together.

If you’re are there, look for Eric to learn more about TileMill and open source mapping.

Design Decisions for Mapping Temperature and Precipitation at Durban

Development Seed — 2011-12-06T00:00:00-08:00

The primary focus of the temperature and precipitation maps launched by the World Bank on Friday at the COP-17 meetings in Durban is of course the data being visualized. In the case of climate4development.worldbank.org, this is the projected global temperature change by the end of this century.

Temperature change in 2100 assuming a world with a continuously increasing global population and regionally oriented economic growth (scenario A2).

The maps are designed to be highly interactive, allowing users to hover over different parts of the world to get a more detailed look at the yearly annual trends. To achieve this we’re using the Google API to generate line graphs on the fly from data stored in the map. Check out our tutorial to try this on your own maps.

In this post I’ll outline some of the design decisions I made with the maps on this site and some tips for approaching similar maps when designing maps with TileMill. This is especially actionable since the World Bank opened up a significant amount of the data we used to make these maps in the site’s /open section.

Data layer as the base layer

The data layers are 2x2 degree grids covering land and ocean. We decided to provide only minimal geopolitical context - an overlay of coastlines and international borders, which are composited on top of the data. With this approach, the data takes the spotlight with full opacity and rich, bold colors. Compared to the traditional mashup approach of transparent overlays on a more complex baselayer, we have a much cleaner result. We are also keeping things modular - any changes that need to be made to the borders style happen in one place instead of a dozen.

Coloring a changing planet

Both the temperature and precipitation maps show projected change in median measurements, so I chose a diverging color scale where white indicates no change and the darkest colors indicate the most change. For temperature this diverging scale ended up being completely one-sided - there is no grid cell where the climate models project a decrease. For precipitation, darker shades of blue indicate areas projected to receive more precipitation, and darker shades of yellow indicate areas projected to receive less.

Color schemes used to show projected precipitation change (left) and temperature change (right).

The color scales I have chosen shift hue somewhat, but the primary contrast between steps is in the brightness of the color. I find maps like this to be more readable when brightness change is used in this way because the darker areas immediately stand out - and the darker areas are the ones we want to draw attention to. Compare the above designs to a version where only hue shift is used as a differentiator.

Scale appropriate datasources

The transparent context overlay contains coastlines and lakes from Natural Earth and international land borders from the World Bank. Natural Earth data is distributed at three scales: 1:110 million, 1:50 million, and 1:10 million. I used all three scales at appropriate zoom levels in order to avoid detailed areas of coastline clustering into dark blobs. I’m also showing large lakes depending on zoom level according to their Natural Earth assigned Scale Rank - smaller lakes are hidden at lower zoom levels.

Patterns

Our data layers cover both land and ocean. We want to show these numbers equally, but still orient the viewer as to where land and water are. This can get a bit confusing if we’re overlaying lines alone, so I made a series of buffers around the land layer and applied a semi-transparent wavy pattern fill to illustrate which side of the coastline is water and which is land.

A piece of advice of using patterns with TileMill - make sure the pixel dimensions of your pattern can evenly divide 256, the size of a single tile. Then use the polygon-pattern-alignment: global; Carto style to ensure that patterns in different geometries will line up with each other. Example: a pattern image with pixel dimensions of 64x32 will tile neatly.

A few of the maps patterns were also used to indicate other information on top of the base maps. In this example, we are showing the regular temperature baselayer with an overlay of solid and striped white masking out certain areas. Areas where more color shows through indicate areas with higher percentages of cropland cover.

Do it yourself with TileMill

All of these climate maps from the World Bank were designed in TileMill, our open-source map design studio. MapBox Hosting and Wax provide the compositing and interactive elements of the maps. For further details on using TileMill to make your own maps, check out our full documentation.