Show HN – Get Your Own Maps – Pixel Perfect | Hacker News Reader

Show HN – Get Your Own Maps – Pixel Perfect

getyourmap.com

51 pointsTapaJob36 comments

GLMap is a framework for iOS developers with a simple mechanism for integrating detailed and lightweight offline maps into any application.

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This looks really promising, particularly the ability to switch styles on the fly. It could perhaps work as an onramp to get an app out there before switching to something custom-built as traffic builds. I'm tempted.

(Declaration of interest: I invented MapCSS, the styling language which this uses.)

Glad, you like it. And thanks for MapCSS. ;)

Out of interest, what sort of storage are you using for the vector data? Is it OSM PBF, MapBox vector tiles, or something custom?

It's custom msgpack based tile format + sqlite.

Particularly interesting for game developers who can use it deeply customize maps to fit well into their gaming experience. I am tempted to build a monopoly-like game with the real world up for sale and purchase. And one like Need for Speed with real-world traffic. Even one for amateur marathon runs on countryside terrains.

You mean like this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_City_Streets

Oh yes, I also used to make casual games in flash for social platforms like facebook back in 2009. These days it's OpenGL and mobile. The market size is bigger and user experience better. Btw, 5m accounts in three months despite so many launch issues is not bad.

I am currently working on a location-based game for iOS and have been using Google Maps SDK and I'm extremely interested in this.

Google Maps has refused to respond to all requests for custom styled maps on iOS despite being the most requested feature.[1]

I've also tried MapBox but both have been giving very bad performance on iPhone 4... this could be just my code, however as a game I really need to perform a lot of animation on the map itself and these 2 options perform quite poorly in my experience.

Another issue with map SDKs is that there's usually no way to turn off road names. I just need the road vectors to be rendered (like Ingress) so players get a baring of where they are relative to their roads, but not necessarily the name of the roads. I imagine that it would be more performant if I could turn that off. Neither Google nor Mapbox allows this unfortunately.

Might give this a go to see how well it works with all the things we're throwing at our map functionality. Thanks!

[1] - https://code.google.com/p/gmaps-api-issues/issues/detail?id=...

I recommend you read the terms of service for the Google Maps API very thoroughly.

Thank you for the recommendation. I'm looking through it right now. Is there anything specific you wanted to point out that I should look out for? It's a pretty long document and I didn't want to miss anything important.

How does this differ from MapBox? I was going to use MapBox, but just learned about this one.

Looking at their getting started page, it seems to be much simpler to integrate in terms of getting the barebones map up and running.

I haven't had time to dive into it yet so don't take my word for it but I suspect it would be similar in feature and performance.

Looks nice, but since it's completely unclear who's behind this, I personally wouldn't buy. People, add an imprint at least, better an "About us" page.

So does it mean that you will never purchase a service from somebody who you don't know? Let's say they added an about us page and list their names, but you still don't know these people, does it mean you won't purchase the service even tho they have an "About Us" page?

Online, I only purchase stuff if they have a legally-looking imprint and make a general impression of seriousness. And while this website has a nice design, the lack of an imprint implies that there's something sketchy going on. My reasoning is: If someone is afraid to put his complete name + address online, there must be a reason for it and I'm not the one wanting to do business with him or her.

Edit: I don't have to know the people. And the About-Us page isn't very important. I just want to see that it's a legitimate business and usually in most countries, this requires the company to put a full address on their website.

And if that address is a fake address?

I really don't understand your reasoning for wanting an About Us page before purchasing a service. I don't feel that this level of paranoia is appropriate when using online services.

Don't get hung up on that about page too much. An imprint is usually fine, an about page is even better.

The reason is very simple: From my experience, legitimate businesses have an imprint. As I said, an imprint is mandatory in most countries for commercial websites and trying to hide the address is very sketchy.

The service costs $29/mo. Most people here make more than that per hour. It's completely illogical to worry about losing $30 unless that $30 has high utility to your life.

If they steal your money, you can make an HN submission about your experience, which will completely ruin their reputation. Their reputation is far more valuable than whatever small amount of pocket change they could skim by tricking a few HN users. Therefore, the chance that your money is going to be stolen is hovering just above nil.

Aren't you exaggerating when you say that

> an HN submission about your experience, [..] will completely ruin their reputation

Are there any cases like the example you suggested?

If they literally stole your money, which is what the parent poster was worrying about, then there's no chance their reputation will last very long. The HN post would just be the manifestation of that. In fact, I don't think anyone has ever posted a "Show HN" with malicious intent, let alone gotten away with it.

The "get your map" company, by the looks of it. [/captain obvious]

The person behind this is a good friend and a great developer who has other great products including:

http://wirelessdjapp.com/

He is called Evgen Bodunov and here is his profile on linkedin:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/molind

A link to a lecture he gave on Map Rendering using OpenGL ES 2.0:

http://vimeo.com/73200653

Good for him. Tell him to put that information on the web page.

I'll add it.

We are small team from Belarus. Developers of Galileo Offline Maps (http://galileo-app.com), and framework was made from vector rendering engine developed originally for Galileo.

Well the data is from OpenStreetMap, you can know what you're getting there.

Also worth considering: https://code.google.com/p/mapsforge/

Always cool to see more uses of openstreetmap. Gives me even more motivation to work on it.

Looks cool, but does it do affine/perspective rendering? I'm looking for a map service that allows me to project the map but still render labels in 2D. Or preferably, to get the various layers on their own framebuffers to be rendered arbitrarily. Elevation data would be a plus also.

GDAL is a pretty cool opensource library that will do affine transformations. And it looks like you can use it with IOS projects. So you might want to check that out. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12643898/incorporating-gd...

Looks great, but I'm not an iOS developer so I can't use it :(

Are you thinking of expanding to other platforms other than iOS?

Yes, we'll add Android support later this year.

How about the web platform?

GLMap.framework made for offline maps on mobile devices. Most of it written in C++11, and we can't port it to JavaScript + WebGL.

As far I know Mapbox works on WebGL map rendering solution.

Are you based in Karlsruhe (which is displayed on your front page)? I graduated from the KIT there…

We're based in Minsk, Belarus. I was in Karlsruhe on SotM-EU'14 recently, and I like shape of the city centre. It's looks beautiful on map. :)

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