Coming soon: City map, redux
I’ve been spending some time reworking the ExploreShanghai City map. It’s not quite ready for primetime but I thought you might be interested in a preview. The new version will feature:
- Accurate street mapping for all of Shanghai
- Full zoom-in/zoom-out: see all of Shanghai or just your street
- Faster startup - downloads just the map data you need.
- Many more pin types and icons
- Turn on and off different pin types: see all hospitals, all Chinese restaurants, etc.
- An enhanced API with plotting by latitude/longitude for integration with other data (GeoRSS, KML files)
Look out for the new ExploreShanghai City to be launched in the next couple of months.
An example of the new categories. Categories can be turned on/off with checkboxes
Some detailed road data, you can see the Huangpu River in outline!
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May 20th, 2007 at 11:54 pm
Awesome! You are doing a great thing
Did Dan get in touch with you about Shanghaiist?
May 21st, 2007 at 2:42 am
yep, hopefully ExploreShanghai will soon be powering all of Shanghai’s websites
May 23rd, 2007 at 3:50 pm
Great idea! But it would be a lot better if you would use correct Pinyin on the city map (e.g., “Beijing Donglu” not “Bei Jing Dong Lu”, “Hubei Lu” not “Hu Bei Lu”, “Renmin Dadao” not “Ren Min Da Dao”, “Guangxi Beilu” not “Guang Xi Bei Lu” — and not “Guan [sic] Xi Bei Lu” either).
Your subway map already has correct word parsing.
May 25th, 2007 at 1:34 pm
Seconding Mark’s opinion.
One more suggestion: you know what really made Wang Jianshuo’s map take off? The fact that you could add locations and then it was easy to link to them. And then it emphasized the links by showing you links of nearby places, and recently added links, etc. LINKS ARE KEY. But that’s just an opinion!
Oh, and ExploreShanghai will never power all of Shanghai’s websites until it includes Pudong (at least the part with my house
May 25th, 2007 at 3:12 pm
Your link design is infinitely better than Wang Jianshuo’s though. *shudders*
July 4th, 2007 at 12:31 am
Embedding a map into another site isn’t exactly a new idea (think google). There are already other Shanghai sites that embed external maps, e.g. my favourite blog about local food, http://www.likealocal.cn
August 22nd, 2007 at 2:31 am
Great map! I have been doing something similar lately (trying to get the community to add places on the map). I like the drag function. How did you make/get the actual map? Have you thought of a mobile page to go with that?
Cheers,
Jonas
August 25th, 2007 at 1:57 pm
I drew the map myself
I will think about mobile integration, I think a feature to allow SMSing an address to your phone would be very handy.