Map Geek Heaven
[After letting this blog languish for over a year - mostly because all of the OneNote topics I might have wanted to write about have been under tight wraps - I'm going to try to fire it up again. It will probably end up being mostly general tech blather, since we're setting up a separate OneNote team blog]
Smugmug recently started supporting geocoding of images, and has nice integration with Google maps. Unless you have a camera with a built-in GPS, however, their current method to mark up images with lat/lon gets old rather quickly. There clearly needs to be an interface that shows you all the pictures in a gallery and lets you drag/drop them onto the map to indicate where they were taken. Perhaps there's some external app that hooks up to Google Earth or NASA World Wind to edit JPEG EXIF like this?
Speaking of which - I've been using Google Earth (formerly Keyhole) for a while, but only got around to playing with World Wind a few weeks ago (both of these apps are streaming 3D earth mapping clients - the map data streams in on demand as you navigate around the planet). What I like about WW:
- A much more useful mouse navigation model. Unlike in GE, you can actually pan, zoom and rotate without using the keyboard.
- Many base imagery layers, including Landsat satellite, USGS topo and orthophoto (higher-resolution than all but the urban-area satellite imagery), MODIS (up-to-date imagery of current events), plus a plethora of specialized, animatable thematic layers. GE has only a single bitmap for the entire planet.
- Related to the above, support for different layers for different camera elevations (e.g. 1:24,000 topo if you're at 2,000m, 1:100,000 topo if you're at 20,000m).
- It's completely free (GE has "Plus" and "Pro" versions).
- It's written in C# using managed DirectX. Gotta love that.
Google Earth still has the edge on:
- Render quality and speed. It's snappier and uses properly filtered textures at large distances, plus it has a nice atmosphere effect. Given the same data, it just looks better.
- Better vector data layers (streets, rivers, etc.).
- More consistently accurate elevation data. WW's data seems to be based on the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data set, which can be higher resolution but is marred by occasional glitches (sudden cliffs where there shouldn't be any, etc.).
