Oregon Hikers

https://blog.gaiagps.com/easy-to-read-t ... gaia-topo/

They fixed a lot of bad elevation data and they look quite nice now. It looks like they used CalTopo’s contours layer for elevation but there’s no credit to them so maybe they built it off the USGS DEMs.

Anyway, the OSM data is about a month old but it’s vector so they should be able to update it relatively quickly.

All of Washington and Oregon says it’ll be about 500 MB to have on my phone so that’s nice too.

EDIT: Washington and Oregon ended up 993 mb, but I have room, so still decent.

I had just finished a first look at the new interface, and then saw this post. From a graphic design standpoint, the new look is very nice. The maps look very clean and easy to read; the info you need appears to be all there. Zooming in and out is very smooth with appropriate levels of detail at each level. I imagine a lot of thought and work goes into the design decisions in order to make it appear very simple.

Yes, web/mobile cartography is subtle and complicated. Getting features to show up at the proper zoom and choosing which features they are. Designing for bad vision or color blindness, etc. Deciding if a line is 0.2 mm wide at one zoom level but 0.3 at another and then balancing that with the other clutter on the map.

It was on small task to do this and I’m glad they finally did although I don’t really use the app anymore.

Have you compared it to this?

https://naturalatlas.com/map

Webfoot wrote: ↑

January 30th, 2020, 5:10 pm

Have you compared it to this?

https://naturalatlas.com/map

That’s a great map too. It has groundcover coloring at all zoom levels and some elevation tint (hypsometric tint if you ever wondered). Gaia doesn’t but it is worldwide.

CalTopo’s MapBuilder layer has groundcover too, but CalTopo is always unusably slow when I visit (and too cluttered at some zoom levels).