TopoZone replacement?

[colden46]

Right, I understand that, but that's not what I'm looking for. I want to be able to enter in the name of a lake, stream, mountain, or whatever, and be able to quickly bring up a topo map of that location. Mostly in the Adirondacks or New York in general, but not always. With Topozone I could do that in literally 10 seconds or less. I don't want to have to figure out the quad name, download a 15MB zip file, unzip it to get a huge PDF, wait for Acrobat to load, and then scroll around in the map until I find what I'm looking for.

Also, when I click the link that says "Search Help" it says that physical or natural features "are not valid search terms at this time", but that's exactly what I want to search for. I'm not saying this isn't a useful tool, because it certainly is, and having a way to easily download quads is great. And I certainly appreciate the help. Unfortunately, it doesn't solve the particular problem that Topozone did for me.

[colden46]

Originally Posted by pico23

Oh crapola, i just realized you put the database to link with google maps...nice work. I missed the post with the link, so I'm like what are these guys talking about.

definitely useful for a quick view of an area. and how did you get it to escape the usual google 800x600 box that annoys me.

Hmm... I've never had that problem, at least on Google's site. Most people who embed Google Maps seem to be stuck at the fixed resolution though. You can make the map on Google's site fill up that area on the left side of the screen by clicking the arrow that's just to the left of the map window. On my thing I just used Javascript to tell it to resize the map when the browser window is resized, the same way Google does it on their site.

Like I said before, I want to make it so the map is actually a USGS topo, not their weird kind-of topo map. Since the forecast for the weekend is less than promising, I imagine I'll have some time. I think there are people out there who already have topo layers for Google Maps, so I can probably just leverage off of that without having to do it myself. Either way, it's a fun little project for me.

[AntlerPerak]

Yeah I see what you mean. I was looking for a place called Bald Hill and no way can it find it. With topozone it was a piece of cake. Yeah you can get the topos which is great but to pinpoint things you can't do it there.

You mentioned waiting for adobe to load, I know a pain in the neck. Ever hear of Foxit? Reads pdf files lets you write on them loads in seconds no bloat ware and it is free. I don't even have that Adobe on my system anymore. Oh yeah you know the jumping around you suffer when trying to scroll in Adobe. Well there is no jumping with foxit is scrolls smoothly. give it a try at http://www.foxitsoftware.com/

[colden46]

Round 3: http://adirondack-park.net/topo/

We have topos! Right now I'm just loading topos from Terraserver into the Google Maps interface, leveraging off of another site that already did this (in other words, I kind of copied their code). Just click the "Topo" map type in the upper-right corner.

Also, search results and the map interface are now combined into the same page, kind of like the regular Google interface (sorry Wildriver, I had to make your icon smaller). To hide the search results so the map is bigger, click the left arrow that's between the search results and the map.

There's still a lot to do, like not send you back to Terrain mode when you switch pages in the search results (if you were in Topo mode). And make it easier to select and zoom in on a point (right now you have to double-click on its icon on the map). And have a more obvious way to get your search results back after they've been hidden. There's also a bunch of things I'd still like to add, like displaying the current mouse coordinates, etc etc. But I thought I'd share in case others find it useful. I've tried it in Firefox and IE7, but that's all. If anybody wants to buy me a Mac, I'll try it in Safari

It's still New York only on the place name data, but I should have the whole country up by the morning, after my 300MB upload of the data finishes and then it adds it to the database.

Edit: data for the whole country is there.

[AntlerPerak]

Originally Posted by colden46

Round 3: http://adirondack-park.net/topo/

We have topos! Right now I'm just loading topos from Terraserver into the Google Maps interface, leveraging off of another site that already did this (in other words, I kind of copied their code). Just click the "Topo" map type in the upper-right corner.

Also, search results and the map interface are now combined into the same page, kind of like the regular Google interface (sorry Wildriver, I had to make your icon smaller). To hide the search results so the map is bigger, click the left arrow that's between the search results and the map.

There's still a lot to do, like not send you back to Terrain mode when you switch pages in the search results (if you were in Topo mode). And make it easier to select and zoom in on a point (right now you have to double-click on its icon on the map). And have a more obvious way to get your search results back after they've been hidden. There's also a bunch of things I'd still like to add, like displaying the current mouse coordinates, etc etc. But I thought I'd share in case others find it useful. I've tried it in Firefox and IE7, but that's all. If anybody wants to buy me a Mac, I'll try it in Safari

It's still New York only on the place name data, but I should have the whole country up by the morning, after my 300MB upload of the data finishes and then it adds it to the database.

Outstanding!!!! Now can you make it so you can full screen the map?

Talk about ingrates, get a great effort like this and ask for more. Shame shame shame

[colden46]

Originally Posted by AntlerPerak

Outstanding!!!! Now can you make it so you can full screen the map?

Thanks Do you mean hiding not only the search results on the left, but the search box on top too? Try now, I just added a way to do it, click the up arrow just above the map. But Wildriver might not appreciate you not being able to see his logo anymore

I need to figure out a better way to do the hiding though. It works for the most part, but it's a little goofy. And it doesn't work right on IE6. Oh well, this is why I'm not a web developer. I should add a single button to go full-screen too. Having to click twice is a pain. Maybe tomorrow if it snows, ha.

[AntlerPerak]

That's it exactly it is 11:23 pdt got back from the ball game an hour or so ago. Hey it appears the whole country is up. well at least the parts I looked at. I was curious about a place called Bald Hill on property owned by Weyerhaeuser. They allow hiking on the property and it seemed interesting. Open summit with good views etc. Generally snow free year round. We already discussed the lack of search options on the USGS site. I found a Univ of Wash index of usgs maps for this state to download only no viewing. It took a long time to figure out which topo I needed. I spent a couple of hours downloading and searching several topos to pinpoint the spot.

I Just tested your search in less than three seconds the choice of 4 Bald hills popped up two of them in the same county. One click later and I am looking at right one. You did a great job and should be proud of your efforts. Don't stop working now I like the idea of the long/lat mouse id. I don't recommend spending a lot of time over the issue of shifting out of topo mode when doing another search. It's really no big deal to click on the topo button to shift back. The full screen feature is good if you want to print out a map. Yeah I know you can print screen and paste into a photo editor for printing, but full screen gives you more area to print.

Thanks for a tremendous effort Might I suggest Mavs and Neil give you the ADK Forum Hiker Service Award which I am sure they are about to initiate.

[Mavs00]

Great work Colden

[DuctTape]

I was upset when I read your post about topozone, but what you have created is better! Nice job.

[Bill I.]

Originally Posted by colden46

(sorry Wildriver, I had to make your icon smaller).

That's all right... as the logo shrinks, so does the dollar figure on that check you asked for.

The site looks great, by the way.

[pico23]

Gotta say, nice work...this is outstanding. I like the Google relief maps, but being able to toggle between relief, road, sat and topo is excellent.

This is actually something useful, and at least at 5:30am it seems to be fast, blows away Word Wind.

Ok now I'll toss in a request, any chance of being able to add a tilt function? Something like on World Wind? I find that amazingly useful for really visualizing terrain.

In any case well done!!

[AdRegion]

Gotta go to "work", but here's a quick suggestion:

Download and install Google Earth - Free version is fine.

I've attached a zip with two files, extract them and open with Google Earth. Save to My Places.

3Dsolar Ltd addons for Google Earth.kmz - This will give you a variety of useful layers, USGS Topo, Ortho, etc. Don't use more than one layer at a time.

dds-mapfinder.kml - This is basically an overlay of the Quadrangle Index with a link to the respective topographic map's download at archive.org. This will get you a hi-res tiff of the official USGS digital map.

[colden46]

Thanks everybody, I'm glad other people find it useful. And I apologize in advance for the super-long post.

I've done some more updates (http://adirondack-park.net/topo/):

- Search can now be done on any word, so if you search for "Colden" it'll find the lake, mountain, and apparently some towns and other stuff with that name. This can end up with a lot of results depending on the search term -- for example, Hudson yields 600+ results across the country -- so it helps to limit it by state or type (i.e. mountain, lake, etc). The "exact match" and "starts with" search methods are still available.

- The location in the USGS database for rivers is the river's mouth. So, searching for the Oswegatchie River shows where it empties into the St. Lawrence. For most rivers, the data also has the river's source, and you can now show that by clicking the "source" link next to the river's name in the search results. It seems to be pretty accurate for the most part.

There are some quirks you have to understand, for instance the Ausable River's source is listed as Au Sable Forks. That's because upstream from that there are separate entries for the East and West Branches, whose mouths are listed at Au Sable Forks where they combine to form the Ausable proper. The sources of the branches are shown where you would expect; up by Heart Lake and Ausable Lakes.

- Current mouse coordinates and center of map are shown, currently in Deg/Min/Sec. I'd like to be able to show that in UTM, but the conversion is complicated -- I know how to do it (we deal with this stuff at work), I just don't know if it'll take up all the CPU of the system just to move the mouse

- Easier way to go fullscreen and leave fullscreen.

- You can now make direct links to the map, for instance for passing links around. Right now you have to click "Link to This Page" in the bottom-right corner of the map, and then copy the URL from the location bar. I'll work on a better way to do that, but it works for right now.

I wish the zoom level for viewing the topos was slightly different. It seems at one zoom level it's a little too zoomed out, and at the next one it's a little too zoomed in. I don't think I can change that though, so I guess I'll have to live with it.

Originally Posted by pico23

This is actually something useful, and at least at 5:30am it seems to be fast, blows away Word Wind.

Ok now I'll toss in a request, any chance of being able to add a tilt function? Something like on World Wind? I find that amazingly useful for really visualizing terrain.

Thanks, I'm glad it was fast enough. I've never been impressed with the speed to Terraserver, I mean it's not terrible but it's not lightning fast like google usually is for me. So I'm glad it doesn't seem too bad. I can't complain though, they have all the topos so I don't need to scrounge a big new hard drive to host all the data (the raw data from NYS GIS, granted it's TIFFs but at least they're not RGB, is over 3GB). Their terms of service even say it's ok to link directly to their imagery, at least for the topos -- maybe the USGS mandated that.

As for the tilt, I'm afraid that's not possible with Google Maps. It would definitely be a nice feature. With Google Earth and what AdRegion mentioned you should be able to do it though.

Originally Posted by AdRegion

Gotta go to "work", but here's a quick suggestion:

Thanks for the links. I've used the USGS layers in Google Earth before, and I think I've seen a way to search the USGS database from within Earth. That's about the closest I've found to what Topozone did for me. My only complaint about this method (and it's a minor one) is that I prefer the convenience of being able to look at it in a web browser rather than a separate application.

Originally Posted by wildriver

That's all right... as the logo shrinks, so does the dollar figure on that check you asked for.

[TCD]

This has been my "go to" site since it was created. I supplement it with GIS, etc., but as a "one stop" site it has been the best. Thanks!

But now the Topo feed appears to be offline. Terrain, Satellite, and Map feeds still work fine, but no Topo. It went off line in early February, then came back for a couple weeks (with maps able to be zoomed to a greater extent), and then went off line again to stay a couple weeks ago.

Anyone know what's up?

Thanks.

[stripperguy]

Apparently, it just comes and goes with no warnings or announcments...
As of a moment ago, it's baaack...
has anyone tried here:
http://mapper.acme.com/