Stamen’s Mike Migurski announced today the release of the mapping library that he and Shawn Allen and Darren David have been working on: Modest Maps.
Following up on a series of map-based projects that improve on the full-screen tile-based system that Google Maps paved the way with (haha!), Modest Maps is an open source project that lets designers and developers use any map-based tiling system they choose, instead of being constrained by Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft’s maps. Want to use Microsoft’s photo maps with Yahoo’s road maps laid over them? Pull in Open Street Map tiles into a sexy flash display system that you control? Modest Maps does all these things really well, and has the benefit of being open source, so outside developers can contribute to the project as they see fit.
It’s pretty:
Related Projects:
This work comes out and extends of a series of projects that Mike and Stamen have been doing with tile-based, non-google-centric mapping systems:
GSV 1.0 (Giant-Ass Image Viewer) (which for a good long while now has been the top google search result for “giant ass):
Cabspotting, which tracks the GPS positions of taxis in San Francisco:
And most recently, Mike’s mapping of crime locations in Oakland, and the times they happen:
We’ve been using the code in a series of client projects we’re currently working on, which is great, since it gives us alot more flexibility in how we represent geographic data moving forward, and we don’t have to start from scratch every time. Yay, Mike, yay, Modest Maps!