ProjectX Blog

We’ve been working with one of clients on marker performance. The problem with markers is they take a long time to load up especially when you add a lot of makers eg. over 100 markers. The performance gets worse when you add polygons or polylines to the map and as you add or remove layers to the map

One of the problems is that the marker class is full of features - Info Windows, shadows, custom icons etc. The browser has to manage all of the DOM objects for the functionality.

To improve the performance, we’ve created a new marker class called GMarkerSimple. The class has a cutdown set of features ie. ‘onclick’ and ‘openInfoWindow’ to improve the speed. We have also introduced a marker cache to ‘cache’ marker objects in memory to improve performance when adding and remove marker layers.

The performance improvement is quite astounding, especially when you compare it to Google.

FireFox 2.0.14

# markers	Gmarker Class	GMarkerSimple Class
100	0.286 secs	0.085 secs
300	1.207 secs	0.258 secs

IE 6.5

# markers	Gmarker Class	GMarkerSimple Class
100	1.322 secs	0.018 secs
300	5.409 secs	0.620 secs

Don’t take our word for it. Try it for yourself - 100 marker test, 300 marker test.

ZoomIn milestone

john — Wed, 07 May 2008 01:01:38 +0000

A couple of days ago, ZoomIn passed the 10,000 user mark!

Looking at the stats we currently have over 52,000 places, 5200 pictures, 4000 comments and 1100 ratings.

A big thank you to all our users who have contributed to ZoomIn.

Here’s a selection of the top contributors to ZoomIn, thank you one and all!

benn

300 places, 20 photos, 113 comments

citric_labs

248 places, 0 photos, 1 comment

tagg

204 places, 5 photos, 29 comments

qwandor

176 places, 2 photos, 9 comments

tom

159 places, 135 photos, 29 comments

spangleking

35 places, 471 photos, 22 comments

jac

151 places, 465 photos, 98 comments

daniel_wang

38 places, 255 photos, 30 comments

rosslin

25 places, 163 photos, 25 comments

time2dine

23 places, 3 photos, 114 comments

dayout

115 places, 2 photos, 87 comments

nedbedrock

31 places, 50 photos, 68 comments

nik

53 places, 90 photos, 67 comments

nztr

51 places, 0 photos, 59 comments

Picture of all the Government Agencies in NZ on the map.

john — Wed, 07 May 2008 00:44:31 +0000

I was found this picture on my hard drive showing where all the government agencies are in NZ. We created the image for the Broadband strategy challenge.

I thought it was kinda cool.

Its a big image, a 1.7Mb jpg.

Thoughts on GoVis conference and Spatial barcamp

john — Tue, 06 May 2008 21:44:26 +0000

I attended the Spatial barcamp and GoVis conference last week and here are my thoughts.

I thought the conference was great way for the industry to get together and network. It was nice to see some interesting talks from the speakers on how GIS was integrated into enterprise solutions

Open source good, Open standards better

The New Zealand Geospatial Office is promoting the use of open source tools (mapserver, mapguide etc) and open standards around government agencies. Its great to see more open source being promoted.

The use of open standards, KML, WFS, WMS etc will be a good way for people to share data. As a industry we already have a lot of proprietary formats, we need to promote open standards to enable better interaction between organisations.

I would offer a word of caution, using open source tools (just like anything else) is not going to be a magic bullet solution. You need to select the right tool for the job.

At ProjectX, we used a number of open source and propriety tools to make our maps. We’ve switched from mapserver to Manifold and now back to mapserver because the quality of the generated imagery wasn’t good enough for us.

Innovation under the surface

It was great to some innovations and ideas that going on out there. Big things like Aerial capture via microlight and dynamic object tracking systems, and smaller things like Napier City council making more of it core data available via open source tools.

It made me think, that as an industry (and companies in NZ) we don’t market our ideas very well. Even at ProjectX, we have a lot of things we built for clients or internally that is innovative and leading edge that never sees the light of day.

To that end, I’m working with Gavin from gis.org.nz to create a news portal for GIS / Geo-spatial news in New Zealand. We’re looking at creating a news system for companies to talk about new products, ideas and issues in the our space. We’re in the process of setting it up properly now, so stay tuned.

Partnerships

It was refreshing to see that all the GIS departments in the Auckland region were working together. Personally I don’t think there are enough partnerships between players. There is a lot of innovation happening in NZ, and we need to work together to take on the world!

Xlinks digest - 05 / 05 / 08

john — Mon, 05 May 2008 04:04:59 +0000

Ajax performance analysis

Added on 05/05/2008 at 07:22AM

Google now lets you advertise on TV

Added on 05/02/2008 at 03:41PM

Rowan Simpson - Speed is not something you can solve: - its all about continous measurement and improvement.
Added on 04/30/2008 at 10:48PM

Rod Drury on Productivity
Added on 04/30/2008 at 09:28PM

More active mobile phones in Australia than people
Added on 04/30/2008 at 10:26AM

Map reduce: Simplified data processing on large clusters
Added on 04/30/2008 at 10:09AM

Average webpage size triples since 2003
Added on 04/30/2008 at 10:04AM

Fast streaming ajaxy proxy
Added on 04/30/2008 at 09:32AM

The Startup curve as drawn by Paul Graham
Added on 04/28/2008 at 12:46PM

Seth Godin Action Figure
Added on 04/28/2008 at 11:31AM

Edward Tufte looks at the iPhone
Added on 04/28/2008 at 10:37AM

Better reporting with sparklines
Added on 04/28/2008 at 09:39AM

Naming is important:

SimulScribe or PhoneTag.

Simple is better.
Added on 04/23/2008 at 12:46PM

Startup School 08: conference for hackers interested in startups
Added on 04/22/2008 at 04:17PM

What is the future of ajax applications talking to the data tier
Added on 04/22/2008 at 11:56AM

A tale of four cities..

john — Mon, 05 May 2008 02:55:42 +0000

I’ve been asked to be the panel for the latest UP event - a tale of four cities at SYN bar tomorrow night.

A recent article in Time said that New York, London and Hong Kong were three hub cities of the world. These cities foster innovation, creativity, and set global trends, and generally what happens there affects the rest of the world. Unlimited Potential think the Wellington should be added to the list as the new innovative ’southern hemisphere hub’, and on May 6th we’ll tell you why.

I’m a big believer in Wellington and a big supporter of Silicon Welly and Summer of Code which are doing their bit at making Wellington an international technology destination

And there’s lots of pizza and beer - Make sure you RSVP on the website.

ZoomIn fixes and improvements

john — Mon, 05 May 2008 02:39:59 +0000

We’ve been working hard over the past fews months fixing bugs and making improvements to ZoomIn.

Here’s a summary of what we’ve been working on:

New Functionality

Activity Feed - Here you can see the last 20 actions by our members on ZoomIn.
Popular places - This is where you can see the 10 most popular places, today, this week and of all time.
GeoRSS - We’ve added GeoRSS feeds for the latest places, photos and comments . (For an example of what the GeoRSS feed looks like, have a look at this example on Google.)
Nearby places - On the information page, you can find out what’s nearby your favourite places eg. Here’s whats nearby popular 3c bar.

Usability Improvements

We been make lots of improvements to the functionality on ZoomIn.

We improved our default URL system so that now you can directly link to a map of an address or place or link to information about that address or place. eg. Map of Arrowtown and Information on Arrowtown.
Search - We’ve made improvements to the search, so that it’s more accurate.
Design - From your feedback, we’ve redesigned the map results page to fix a number of layout bugs and remove whitespace thus maximising the map. We’ve also added a new navigation slider to the map.
Photos - We added bigger thumbnails on the information pages and user profile pages. We’ve also allowed users to change the default picture for a place.
Enabled custom IFrame sizes for users who are embed maps on their web page or blogs.

And a whole raft of bug fixes. We’ve got a more new functionality and improvements in the wings that will be released soon.

Choose a default photo for a place on ZoomIn

daniel — Thu, 01 May 2008 03:02:41 +0000

From today on, ZoomIn allows users to choose a default photo for their places. If you are the owner of a place , you have the power to let other users choose a default photo for your place.

Go and do it now, pick the most beautiful photos for your places!

Embed ZoomIn maps on your website

daniel — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 02:23:13 +0000

Yesterday, we released the improved feature of sharing ZoomIn maps, which allows users to embed maps on their websites, also enable users to customize the width and height of the iframe.

Here is an example, I’m using ZoomIn map to show the location of ProjectX