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Showing posts from 2016

Road Point Snapping

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Recently we rolled out our road snapping feature. This feature was something we received requests for a lot, but it was technically very difficult to implement. However, we now have our own open street maps server and this allows us to grab road data directly. Drawing something like a curve before was very difficult. Now with road snapping it is much easier. The output data is actually clean data derived from OSM. Meaning the nodes of the road will match those generated from OSM. We use a combination of tactics for this including path finding and in some cases this might make the road snapping act oddly, we are aware of this and are going to improve it in future versions, but we decided it was good enough to roll out in a beta version so our users could start using it immediately. OSM / Google inconsistencies You might notice as you are using this, the guide layer (represented by a thin blue line) might not line up perfectly with Google. It should line up perfectly with dat

Rotate Tool

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Today we have rolled out a new tool to our line up. We have got a lot of requests for this one and it is the rotation tool. One of the most exciting things about this new update is the ability to rotate text labels. This is something completely new to all versions of Scribble Maps. This will allow you to place text labels on or along streets. This also works with the new "shrink on zoom" feature as well. Check out this gif below to see how it works!

Massive News! Wordpress.com Support!

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We discovered something amazing today that we were not aware of and that is Wordpress.com now supports ScribbleMaps.com interactive embeds! Previous to this the only way to get a ScribbleMaps.com interactive embed on a wordpress site would be to self-host. We are so happy to announce that you can now use our embeds with their hosted solution! How To Embed a Map on Wordpress.com Get the Share Link Embedding a Scribble Map on wordpress.com is as easy as copy and pasting the "share link" into your blog post. The share link is not the same as the embed code. We will be posting an update that identifies the Share Link as a wordpress.com embed as well. Here is a screenshot of what you need to copy from Scribble Maps to get an interactive embed on your blog post. Copy URL Into blog post All you need to do is then post the URL directly into your blog post and it will automatically convert to an interactive embed! We are excited to see how you start using Scribbl

Point Snapping, Line Merging and Legend Creator!

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Today we released a large update that have some things we are very excited about. Point Snapping Something that is very common is creating polygons that are flush with each other. Up until this point making shapes flush with each other was very challenging. With our update today, doing this is now a snap (groans). Point snapping can also be used when changing lines as well. A possible creative feature is using lines and snapping to create polygons that have different color of edges. It is also makes its possible to create accurate T-intersections with correct coordinates. Disable Point Snapping There might be certain instances when you want to disable point snapping functionality and for this we have added a new setting which can be accessed through the menu or the gear in the bottom left. Line Merging Previous to this update it was not possible to merge two lines after they had been drawn. This could result in a lot of time loss if you painstakingly drew a port

Developers: Saving Google API Credits with Autocomplete

There are a lot of winners with Google's new API pricing. However, if your app is using the whole suite of mapping functionality and you have a lot of users you might find your pool will start declining fast. Two functions that will draw directly on your pool and are not subject to the daily free quota is autocomplete and place search. If you use your Google licence with the Scribble Maps API we do some of these optimizations out of the box, but if you are building your own custom implementation directly on top of the Google Maps API, there is a simple update you can do to save you some autocomplete credits. The standard auto-complete functionality will send out an auto-complete request with every change in the input. It's possible to cut the amount of credits used significantly by putting in a timeout when the input changes. Here is a very basic example. var acTimeOut; textSearchInput.onkeyup = function() { clearTimeout(acTimeout); acTimeout = setTimeout(func