OSMify Example

OSMify

I’ve put together a new version of my OSMify bookmarklet. The main reason for doing this is because the old version is linking to the wrong set of Osmarender tiles; it’s linking to the ones on dev.openstreetmap.org rather than the newer ones on tah.openstreetmap.org. Rather than force you to regularly visit this site and setup a new bookmark every time there’s an update, I’ve decided to host the JavaScript for this version of OSMify on my site.

In the previous version, all of the JavaScript to make the new map types appear was contained within the one line bookmark. This time I’ve put all of the important JavaScript into a separate file hosted at johnmckerrell.com/files/osmify.js. The bookmark now only contains some simple JavaScript required to load that file in.

As well as allowing me to make improvements to the code this also makes the code a lot more readable, allowing you to read through it and understand what it’s doing. If you have any improvements that you’d like to suggest then either drop them as comments on here or email them through to me.

One improvement I did want to attempt was to make OSMify work on other sites than Multimap’s. The Multimap API’s custom map type support works in a very similar way to the Google API so it would be easy to support. Microsoft Virtual Earth/Live Maps also have a method for putting custom tiles into their API. Unfortunately with Google, they don’t expose the full API on their public site (i.e. maps.google.com) so it isn’t possible to add custom map types there. The current version of OSMify will work with third-party implementations, though they will need to expose a global map variable that is of type GMap or GMap2. I have also had to tell the code to add a new GMapTypeControl after adding the new map types as for some reason the Google API’s map type control doesn’t update when you add new map types (something the Multimap API does do). I haven’t bothered with Virtual Earth/Live Maps support either yet as I would need to code up my own widget/control for switching between these map types (or tile layers as they call them).

So, the link is at the top of this post, have a go with it and let me know what you think. I’d especially be interested in some feedback on using this with Google maps implementations, and any thoughts you have on getting this to work with more APIs.

Technorati tags: javascript, bookmarklet, osm, openstreetmap, map, liverpool, multimap, maps, favelet