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Showing posts from September, 2014

Straight vs Curve : Understanding Distances

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Today we rolled out some fixes to the site as well as a couple little side simple tools utilizing Scribble Maps. The first is a  distance calculator  and the other is an area calculator . So we thought we would take a little bit of time and explain some important considerations when drawing lines on maps over great distances. Particularly what is the difference between a straight line, which is a Rhumb line on Google Maps, and a curved line. There is a common misconception that if you were to walk in one direction without wavering and then drew a line of all the places you stopped it would appear as a curve on a map. While it is true you would actually walk in a curve, on a Google Map which uses what is called a Mercator projection, the line would actually be straight. This is because the projection Google uses stretches the latitude (y-axis) to make travelling in a straight line appear as a straight line on a map. Travelling in one direction on a globe On a Google Map

Current State of Pro

There has been some confusion regarding pro and we hope this will clear up some confusion. However, before I start I want to say that if you are a paying member you get additional features in the basic editor of Scribble Maps. Some of these features are not available in pro yet including larger images, pdf saving, and secure map saving. This is because the basic editor is actually the most recent version of our tech. On September 2nd Google disconnected their flash maps API. We knew this was coming but we didn't get the memo in mid august and we were under the impression that we actually had to the 15th, we were wrong. This lead to pro going down and us scrambling to come up with a solution. In order to get pro to a functional state for the interim we opted to go with MapQuest because they had a flash API. I use the term interim because we have been working on the new version of Pro which essentially utilizes all the same tech of our new basic editor but with all the extra feat