Ski Map North America

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We've just taken the wraps off our newest feature, our Ski Map North America displaying every ski area in the U.S. and Canada. You can select between different types of maps, including a Google street map, satellite photos, or a hybrid of both, plus USGS topographic maps and the Daily Terra and Daily Aqua maps, which display yesterday's Landsat satellite images, updated daily. It features the ability to pan and zoom.

Known issues include slow loading time -- after all, there are literlly thousands of waypoints to plot on the initial map showing the whole continent -- and a few ski areas whose location is a little bit off, although by and large the vast majority are spot on.
 
riverc0il":rhmd8kos said:
Very interesting, looking good. FYI, you don't have Whaleback, NH. :wink:

Good point -- we do now!

We also found that the overall North American map loaded much too slowly. As a result, although viewing the overall U.S. and Canada is still an option, we've added individual states and regions as well which work rather quickly due to the limited number of waypoints.
 
I think it loads just fine. But perhaps we will have Europe and Southern Hemisphere variants one of these days.
 
Tony Crocker":2x4l786s said:
I think it loads just fine. But perhaps we will have Europe and Southern Hemisphere variants one of these days.

Maybe it's my machine then.

But do you have any idea how many hours are invested in just the US and Canada?? :shock: The original .est file took me a good 60 or so hours to complete. Conversion of that to .kml was no biggie, but that's where the occasional location error was introduced and the URLs of each ski area didn't carry over through the conversion program. Yesterday's Google Maps creation took a good 10 hours because Google's API doesn't yet read their own KML format. :roll:

You want Europe and SA? Be my guest - hop to it. :wink:
 
My apologies, as I didn't realize it was a new feature. The load time was not instant but it was reasonable. I have a near minimum speed cable modem.

Integrating all of that different mapping software is impressive. I still think Google Earth has the most useful views, but at this point we may have to question its precision on altitude. USGS topo shows peak of Mt. Bohemia at 1465 vs. 1254 on Google Earth.
 
Tony Crocker":74ot1edy said:
I still think Google Earth has the most useful views

I agree. Alas, they have yet to craft a Google Earth API for web page implementation. It's strictly a stand-alone program, which is why we make the KML file available for download for those who want it.

As for the map pages, I spent a few more hours today implementing a dynamic list of links for each region with each map page.
 
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