The Map Room

“Uncle” Rod Mollise takes a close look at free star chart software Cartes du Ciel, “a classic of astronomy software, and thanks to the selfless and tireless efforts of its author it’s still as up-to-date and as wonderful as ever.”

Previously: Uncle Rod Looks at Star Atlases.

The Bing Maps Blog announces the release of MapPoint 2010, and goes through some of its new features.

Previously: MapPoint and Streets and Trips 2009.

• Buy Microsoft MapPoint 2010 at Amazon.com
• Buy Microsoft MapPoint 2010 with GPS Locator at Amazon.com

Firefox 3.5 (Release Candidate 1) adds geolocation as a new feature: it calculates a user’s location based the user’s IP address and nearby wireless access points; location-aware sites can then access that location if the user grants permission. Details here. Via Mapperz.

Jillian from Wolfram Research writes, “I thought you and your readers would find today’s post in the Wolfram Blog quite fascinating. It’s all about Mathematica’s capabilities for importing and analyzing geographic GPS data. It includes many fascinating examples — elevation profile, distance computation, and mapping.” (Links added.) The post starts hard and gets harder; it’s worth noting, but probably is reserved for people who know how to use Mathematica.

iPhone Central reviews a trio of weather radar map applications for the iPhone and iPod touch: Radar in Motion, RadarScope (“the heavyweight here”; pictured at right) and Weather Radar (“the weakest of the trio of offerings discussed here”). RadarScope is $10, the others are a buck each.

Two articles from the February 2009 issue of Wired look at location-aware applications for smartphones with built-in GPS (or other means of determining location). Inside the GPS Revolution: 10 Applications That Make the Most of Location is a list of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

iPhone Central’s review of the $1 satellite photo application for the iPhone, Earth Envi, suggests that a small mobile device may not be the best location to appreciate satellite imagery. “Truth is, many of pictures you see on Earth Envi…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Version 8.0 of MAPublisher, the suite of cartographic plug-ins for Adobe Illustrator, was released Monday. Costs US$1,249; upgrades as low as US$549. Via MacNN. Previously: MAPublisher 7.0; MAPublisher 6.0….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Virtual Earth evangelist blog reports that trial versions of Microsoft’s MapPoint 2009 and Streets and Trips 2009 are now available as free downloads: MapPoint 2009 North America, Streets and Trips 2009. Previously: MapPoint and Streets and Trips 2009….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Virtual Earth evangelist blog announces the imminent release of the 2009 editions of Microsoft’s MapPoint and Streets and Trips, with the former available in September and the latter in October….  •  Continue reading this entry.

ScapeToad is software for making cartograms. André Ourednik, its development supervisor, writes: “ScapeToad is a cross-platform, open-source application written in Java, designed and using the ESRI Shapefile format for input and output. It also exports maps in SVG format and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Ogle Earth’s Stefan Geens, normally a (fellow) Mac user, borrows a Windows machine for his in-depth review of WorldWide Telescope: “My initial impression stands: WWT is a wonderful piece of software that excels at rendering Earth’s view of the universe…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Apparently, “by the end of the month” means something a little sooner — i.e., right now: WorldWide Telescope is now available for download. See coverage from Astronomy, Sky and Telescope and Virtual Earth, an Evangelist’s Blog. It’s a beta (probably…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Digital Earth Blog notes reports that Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope may be released by the end of this month — or at least Bill Gates has been quoted saying that it will. I’ll be very interested to know the system requirements….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Microsoft Pro Photo Tools support geotagging, which is interesting, but it’s a bit hubristic to say that geotagging is going mainstream as a result of that, as the title of the article describing Pro Photo Tools’ geotagging features does. Which…  •  Continue reading this entry.

EarthBrowser is a virtual globe application I hadn’t encountered before. It’s $24 shareware and runs on Mac and Windows, but the current buzz is about the next version, version 3, which uses the Adobe Air cross-platform framework. The beta…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Tom Patterson of Shaded Relief wrote in to announce his new project, a physical map of the world. As was the case with his relief map of the United States, it’s free and freely available in several formats, including…  •  Continue reading this entry.

To begin with, here is the video of the TED talk introducing WorldWide Telescope: Reactions, many of which make explicit comparisons to Google Sky: Bad Astronomy: “This does look very cool. It’s much like Google Sky, but from Microsoft’s direction….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Microsoft gave a demonstration today of its forthcoming WorldWide Telescope application, the site for which is now online, but we still don’t have very much hard information about it. A lot of reactions. Robert Scoble, who when he saw a…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Microsoft will be launching a competitor to Google Earth’s Sky feature, called “WorldWide Telescope,” on February 27, TechCrunch reports. The downloadable desktop software is claimed to be “significantly better” than either Google Earth or Stellarium in terms of data and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Free Geography Tools had a seven-part geotagging series last month beginning with this post; it covered a number of Windows applications that I wouldn’t otherwise have been aware of. Richard Akerman has a couple of relevant posts on his Science…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I knew that Adobe was ending development on FreeHand; after its purchase of Macromedia, keeping both the competing FreeHand and Illustrator going made little sense. I should have realized that, like Illustrator, FreeHand has been used to draw maps…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Mapz: A GIS Librarian takes another look at Firefox mapping extensions — all 16 of them, ranging from geotagged photos to online map viewing. Previously: Firefox Mapping Extensions….  •  Continue reading this entry.

UTM Flyer is a small, free program that lets you zoom to a location in Google Earth by entering UTM coordinates; it also converts between UTM and lat/long. Windows-only, so I haven’t tested it. Via Free GeoTools. Previously: New Google…  •  Continue reading this entry.

NASA’s Global Map Projector — G.Projector for short — is a lovely little program that transforms any equirectangular map image (one is included) into another projection. It’s a tremendous amount of fun, and a very useful way of visualizing…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Garmin has released a list of issues with its software running on Windows Vista: Garmin Blog, GPS Review….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Chad has a brief review of Microsoft Streets & Trips 2007 and its accompanying GPS unit: “I think it is very well worth it. … All and all I am impressed with the software and the GPS unit. They…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Roadnav is open-source navigation software meant to be run on an in-car computer connected to a GPS; it runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. “Roadnav can obtain a car’s present location from a GPS unit, plot street…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’ve been following the news about ArcGIS Explorer, ESRI’s putative response to virtual globe software like Google Earth, since it was first announced (James Fee, for example, has blogged about it a lot), but I haven’t blogged about it…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Antique Map Price Record is a CD-ROM-based reference tool that bills itself as more than just a listing of map prices (at auction, for example); it also contains reference images and bibilographical material, according to the publisher, who also…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Mapz: A GIS Librarian takes a look at some mapping-related Firefox extensions: All Your Maps Are Belong to Us, which converts URLs for other mapping sites to Google Maps; GMiF, which embeds a Google Map on a Flickr photo page…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Now that Firefox 2.0 is out, we can look at how it handles the complex code behind online map services. Fantom Planet finds that it handles Google and Yahoo! Maps well, but runs into a few quirks with Live Local….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Microsoft Streets & Trips 2007 was announced today. The highlight is that it comes with an improved USB GPS “locator” that turns your computer into a GPS receiver. This isn’t new: the 2006 version also came with such a…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Recently I’ve received a couple of very similar questions: both are from people asking how to edit and manipulate scans of paper maps. Chris Ellison writes, I am a history teacher who regularly uses maps for teaching purposes. The thing…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Zack reviews three geotagging software options: TopoFusion, WWMX and GPS Visualizer, and RoboGeo. Via GPS Tracklog….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Microsoft’s new Windows Live toolbar (IE 6 on Windows only, naturally) has a couple of mapping features of note, the Windows Live Local/Virtual Earth blog reports, namely, the ability to compile a list of addresses from a web page and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Version 7.0 of MAPublisher, a set of plugins for creating publication-quality maps in Adobe Illustrator, was announced yesterday. Via Cartography. See previous entry: MAPublisher 6.0….  •  Continue reading this entry.

I last mentioned EarthDesk, a program that puts a real-time image of the Earth (showing, for example, day/night and cloud cover) on your desktop background, in March 2004; since then, it’s graduated to version 3.5 and is now compatible with…  •  Continue reading this entry.

GPSBabel is a free (donationware) utility that converts GPS data from one format to another. (It doesn’t convert map data, but such things as waypoints and routes.) Useful, I would imagine, if you’re trying to get ostensibly incompatible hardware and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Another review of MapPoint 2006, this time from Directions: “What were they thinking? Was this product an afterthought? Did Microsoft all of a sudden realize it had not planned for the next version of MapPoint and had to get a…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Matt Rosenberg, the geography editor of About.com, has a review of Microsoft MapPoint 2006: “Microsoft’s MapPoint 2006 is GIS for personal or business use. It’s GIS for those that don’t need layer upon layer of GIS data. It’s GIS for…  •  Continue reading this entry.

MapPoint 2006 is coming soon: Microsoft’s desktop mapping software for businesses is coming to North America this month and Europe in the summer. Via Anything Geospatial. See previous entries: Programming MapPoint in .NET; A Microsoft Roundup. Update: All Points Blog…  •  Continue reading this entry.

S. P. Low from the University of Singapore, looking for software to make cartograms, writes: We are working on a project that attempts to track the global construction market using cartograms, such as those rectangular cartograms used by the World…  •  Continue reading this entry.

GPS Mapping: Make Your Own Maps by Rich Owings Ten Mile Press, 2005. Softcover, 382 pp. ISBN 0-9760926-3-8 This is a book for people who want to get their hands dirty with mapping software and GPS units and generate maps…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Now that it’s available for the Mac, Macworld reviews Google Earth. Robert Gelb reviews Chandu Thota’s Programming MapPoint in .NET: “The bottom line is that if you are developing anything mapping related with Microsoft components, you gotta buy this book….  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’ve been off my feed a bit this past week, so I’ve got some catching up to do. I’ll start with a few random links from here and there about this and that. From the Google Blog: “Not only have…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A clickable map of Tlingit tribes, clans and clan houses in the Pacific Northwest. Via Plep. MapPoint B2B on the future of MSN Maps and Directions, viz., none: “The time has come to say good-bye to MSN Maps and Directions…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Ben Keene, the editor of Oxford University Press’s atlas program (see previous entry), looks at the changes in geography he had to deal with in 2005 (via World Hum). MapQuest has inadvertently left Edmonton off a map of Canadian cities…  •  Continue reading this entry.

If I make these posts a regular occurrence, I’ll have to come up with a catchier title. Anyway, onward, with a few things about online maps and a couple of conferences to tell you about: Ads appearing on Google Maps?…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Here we go again. Google Earth Blog has a collection of downloadable automated storm tracking tools (KMZ file). Google Maps Mania points to a couple of Google Maps based storm trackers. Spatially Adjusted links to ESRI’s existing hurricane viewer and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

If J. Little were just putting something on the web, I’d advise him/her to use Google Maps, but s/he’s looking for something s/he can publish: “If I wanted to make a map of the area surrounding Lake Michigan and add…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Kathryn Cramer reports that new Rita overlays for Google Earth based on updated NOAA imagery are now available. Meanwhile, Wired carries an AP story about mapping the storm surge from Katrina: surveyors are trying to create an atlas of the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

In the past week or so, I’ve learned the following mapping news from Microsoft through map developer Chandu Thota’s blog: Overshadowed by the PDC stuff on Virtual Earth at the time, I guess, but version 4.0 of the MapPoint web…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Kathryn Cramer reports that the first post-Hurricane Rita images from the areas hardest hit by the storm have been posted by NOAA. As was the case with Katrina, the interface — starting with a base map index page — is…  •  Continue reading this entry.

GIS Unshackled: A Guide to Open-Source Tools: a look at some of the open-source software packages, from databases to scalable vector graphics, that can be used in lieu of established commercial software. Via Very Spatial….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Tyler Mitchell talks about the behind-the-scenes work to process approximately 1,500 NOAA images from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and upload them to the Katrina Image Warehouse, using open-source software; the basics were up and running within 48 hours. Via…  •  Continue reading this entry.

While I wait for the long-promised Mac version of Google Earth (hint), I note with interest that both Google Earth and Google Maps got their satellite imagery updated (Google Earth Blog, Google Maps Mania). But a separate enhancement is even…  •  Continue reading this entry.

When the satellite-photo version of Google Maps came out earlier this year, there was some apprehension about the impact of these high-resolution photos on individual privacy. For example, some nervousness about being able to see the car in your driveway….  •  Continue reading this entry.

I posted links to a lot of new blogs next month, but Cartography’s roundup of cartography and related blogs last week brought a grand total of seven more blogs to my attention. Plus, I was already aware of Ed Parsons’s…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Another review of navigation software from the September 2005 issue of Motor Boating magazine (see previous entry)….  •  Continue reading this entry.

(Many updates) Watch Hurricane Katrina’s path via satellite imagery or radar; both are NOAA pages and both require Java. Via Paulo. Kathryn Cramer has been collecting aerial images of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, along with some…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Getting Google Maps onto mobile devices is a natural step: when we’re going somewhere, we tend not to leave our maps behind, after all. One project was a hack to get Google Maps running on Series 60 Nokia phones, combining…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Palm has released an application called Traffic for the Treo 600/650 that provides, for a monthly fee, live traffic data and maps for 10 U.S. cities (via Palm Infocenter)….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Marco Fioretti is looking for GIS PHP modules. He writes, “I have an urgent project to work on which includes processing GIS data with PHP, and I’d really like to start with something which is already tested.” My original post…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Speaking of Tyler Mitchell, he’s got an article on Directions explaining Chameleon, a collection of PHP scripts that, he says, allows non-programmers to build web mapping applications using MapServer through its MapScript API….  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’m overdue in posting this one, which comes to us thanks to James. Tyler Mitchell, whose Web Mapping Illustrated, a guide to free mapping software, is now shipping, had an article up on O’Reilly last month that I think serves…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The O’Reilly Network has an article by Mikel Maron, the creator of Mapufacture and worldKit, that introduces us to what those two tools can do. Mapufacture is a new service to browse, build, and share interactive web maps, on a…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Motor Boating’s Electronics department periodically reviews charting and navigation software (see previous entry); this review of three brands is from their June 2005 issue….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Houston Traffic Map widget makes the information found on the Houston real-time traffic map available as a Dashboard widget (for Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger”)….  •  Continue reading this entry.

GeoPDF looks like the company blog of Layton Graphics, which puts out (pricey) software that adds georeferencing to PDF files. The blog, which started this month, naturally covers their stuff, but also has a few more general map entries. Atom…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Rough Guides has released a series of interactive city maps for several mobile platforms, and they’re having a sale (US$20) in March. Via Gadling. Earthcomber allows Palm OS PDA users to annotate maps and share that information with other users….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Road Trip Effect generates animations for your home movies to indicate your trip. It does so in the classic manner (think Indiana Jones): a plane, ship or car moving across a map and leaving a trail. The site is…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Macworld has a (mixed) review of Route 66’s Route USA 2004, which, despite this review in a Mac magazine, is cross-platform. The reviewer found it sluggish, among other quirks (the usual trip-generation snafus), but liked the GPS integration. See previous…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Waban_star writes in with a link to MICRODEM, “a microcomputer mapping program written by Professor Peter Guth of the Oceanography Department, U.S. Naval Academy.” It’s available for free, apparently, from the site. Waban says, “This is a good program, if…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’ve been meaning to post Tom Patterson’s Shaded Relief site for a while: this is a massive site that deals with the technical issues of creating relief maps. Way too technical for me, but the detail is absolutely fascinating. From…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I don’t think there’s a single area of mapping where software isn’t displacing traditional maps. That goes for navigational charts, too. Motor Boating has a review of recent navigation software for recreational boaters. Some of it’s quite pricey, but let’s…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Jonathan Jackel has a review on TidBITS of Route 66, which is, he says, the only route mapping software available for Mac OS X. (It’s also available in Windows, Pocket PC and mobile phone/Bluetooth versions.) It’s also GPS-compatible, though he…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Mapping Toolbox 2, which, according to its publisher, “provides a comprehensive set of functions and graphical user interfaces for building map displays and performing geospatial data analysis in MATLAB,” was released this week (via MacNN). (I keep track of software…  •  Continue reading this entry.

MAPublisher 6.0 was announced today. It’s a collection of Adobe Illustrator plug-ins that allow you to import GIS data into that software. Manipulating proper data with a proper graphics program, apparently. (via MacCentral)…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Image_GIS is a PHP package that allows you to generate on-the-fly maps in PNG or JPEG image formats from geographical datasets. Don’t worry if you don’t know what this means: essentially it means you can transform raw GIS data into…  •  Continue reading this entry.