I noticed that Google Maps API v3 downloads some unnecessary images/sprites even though I have all controls turned off and use a custom infoBox overlay.
Any way of avoding this?
Specifically, I'm talking about the png files imgs8, iw3 & undo_poly.. together they 'weigh in' at 20kB.
You really shouldn't be bothered about these little images/sprites as map itself takes up much more space, so these images practically doesn't affect the total download time.
Related
I have a sort of setup like... google maps. It has nothing to do with maps but the mechanism seems to be similar.
I have an image ~300MB and the client can drag the picture around having different parts of it in view in the browser. I want to load only the specific parts of the image which the user is looking at, and unload the parts which are out of view (to save RAM).
I thought of breaking the image in 15X15px chunks and load the correct chunks each time but I can't seem to wrap my mind around which technique should I use to actually perform this task.
Any suggestions?
Google Maps breaks up their images (including streetview etc) into smaller chunks. I've seen a lot of people use their own images WITH the Google Maps technology to create their own maps of whatever (one, for example, is a fantasy world/web game I can remember)
Perhaps, instead of reinventing the wheel, inspect the other guys' wheel and see if you can use the same technology to create what you need. GTA for example: http://www.gta4.net/map/
This should get you started: https://developers.google.com/maps/
Google maps api: https://developers.google.com/maps/ seems to allow everything I need but it is clumsy and limited for the types of things I want to do.
It's like solving the problem backwards.. figuring out how to work with the map, and the hiding the map layer... which is... doing a lot of work for nothing.
With that, that seemed to be the best solution out there until I cam acroos this:
Panojs
http://www.dimin.net/software/panojs/
This seems to be super easy to use and quite flexible.
or Zoom.it which is based on SeaDragon which is also super easy to use!
http://www.zoom.it/
Cheers
I have spent about 3 whole days searching for a Google Earth API extension that would enable users to perform selections of placemarks by either clicking multiple points, OR by drawing a polygon. I didn't budget or spec this functionality because I was confident that this is the type of thing that would be readily available for Google Earth. Turns out I was wrong.
At any rate, I am not asking anyone to write the code, I am hoping someone has come across a javascript library that enables this functionality.
As you have discovered GE plugin does not support drawing or dragging without writing some code yourself.
There is an extension library that I have found useful for draggable placemarks. Use makeDraggable().
Example here:
http://earth-api-utility-library.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/extensions/examples/draggable.html
Source here:
https://code.google.com/p/earth-api-utility-library/source/browse/trunk/extensions/src/edit/dragging.js
I believe you want to look at the second example: https://developers.google.com/earth/documentation/events#examples
I have been developing an application on google chrome, and I've been using the MarkerWithLabel library, which i believe is written by google developers. I am using a little over 100 markers on the map and it seemed to be pretty smooth until i checked in firefox (and lets not even mention IE). It is pretty damn laggy in FF. Any way to optimize it?
http://jsfiddle.net/zDTNS/2 Here is a sample in jsfiddle
To clarify, having 200 regular markers works fine. The problem shows up when using MarkerWithLabel
Generally speaking the best way to optimize any Google maps application is using a clustering technique. As the application loads more and more markers the client-side rendering over-head will only increase. The addition of labels only compounds the issue.
A number of clustering techniques exist and are simple to implement, I'd suggest starting with this article: https://developers.google.com/maps/articles/toomanymarkers.
Edit Leaving above in place in case anyone doesn't have the same spec requirement, but similar issue.
My only other suggestion would be to turn off the labels when above a certain zoom level? This will at least alleviate some of the worst of the rendering issues.
Edit After doing a bit of research the library introduced here has been shown to have far more favorable performance characteristics than markerWithLabel. It relies on a html canvas though so is ie9+.
After spending 2 weeks researching and trying all sorts of methods, most suggested on here, I arrived to the conclusion that there just is no way to optimize at the moment. For some reason firefox struggles when there are divs on top of the map and keeping them in sync. The performance on the latest firefox was almost the same as IE8.
I found that having a ton of google markers does not cause any lagging, but divs do. What I ended up doing was create a server side function that converts text to png. When initializing the google marker, you make the icon url TextToImage.aspx?text=Hello&size=13
Then I set the anchor of the new marker to (15, 15) and that became my new 'label'. I added some click and mouseover listeners to the label marker and voila! Insane improvement to performance.
If you only want a couple of characters inside a pin, another alternative is:
https://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chst=d_map_pin_letter&chld=${displayCharacters}|${pinColorHex}|${fontColorHex}
Check this example.
We want to build a google map liked javascript library to show our map data(we can not use google map or yahoo map).
We have done 60% of all the work,we can display the map tiles(img) according to user's drag operation.
Howver we found some problem:
We have a container(div element) to fill the tiles,when use drag on this container,we will do some caculatioin to see if new tiles should to be loaded.
It works. But it seems that when image are loaded,we can hardly move the mouse until imgaes are loaded completed or error.
It seems that the image load thread and the event handle thread is the same.
So any idea to fix it?
Multithreading in javascript exists, but it's still quite new. https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Using_web_workers
I have multiple locations (20+ per page) that need to be mapped on a single map. I would like to click on a link for the location that is not dynamically generated (for SEO purposes) that would open the info window for the respective marker on the map.
Behavior should mimic http://maptheburg.com/ - but this map has the sidebar links dynamically generated.
Yelp.com is the only site I have seen so far that manages to implement the Google Maps API with unobtrusive JavaScript.
I'm not entirely sure what the yelp implementation is but if it's unobtrusive JavaScript mapping you're after then your only feasible option is to deliver a static image rather than an interactive map where JavaScript is unavailable.
A quick walk through of this technique can be found here
HTH.
Yelp.com has it's own JavaScript library which is interacting/using Google Map's JavaScript API for maps. You might want to start by peeking in there.
Might want to also check out PdMarker for advanced Google Maps markers.
If I remember right, Yelp took one of the open-source markers implementations and modified it for their own uses.