I’ve been looking for a while for an online service that would post my recent race routes to Facebook, for my friends to see when I’ve been running, orienteering or cycling. This proved to be surprisingly difficult to do, but I have finally found a service that meets my specific requirements, Endomondo.
My requirements are:
* Post a map of my route
* Map to be decent sized, i.e. not tiny unreadable thumbnail.
* Post to only my friends on Facebook, not the whole world there.
* Post the map (not just the stat) if posting on a subsequent day
* Use the correct day of the race, in my Facebook timeline.
* Accept TCX or GPX files that I have downloaded from my Garmin.
I also tried the following, which didn’t work out in various ways:
* MapMyRun – only posts a tiny map:
* RunKeeper – doesn’t post a map if it’s for a previous day:
…also I had a lot of problems with it saying it had posted to Facebook and then the post didn’t go through. Finally, once it did, it insisted on posting it as world-viewable on Facebook – for brand visibility I suppose, but I only want my friends to see my routes!
* Strava – this seems to work well now with Facebook but it was having issues when I tried back in April:
* ViewRanger – like MapMyRun, doesn’t post anything more than a thumbnail on Facebook.
(Thanks to Alan McG et al for helping me with the research into solutions.)
I’ve fixed and tidied up a visualisation I created back in 2010, which showed the results of that year’s General Election in the UK. Newer versions of OpenLayers had broken it (specifically the use of addUniqueValueRule with a custom context resulted in no circles appearing) and also the UI looked rather rudimentary. Now it has rounded corners, transparency, more spacing and a prettier font!
Although it was my first “coloured circles” visualisation (the Bike Share Map followed on from it a few months later when London’s system launched) it was my most sophisticated, with the circles having different coloured areas and borders, and changing in size – plus a view where the colour itself is calculated from the numeric values – select the “Constituency Colour” from the first pop-down.
The key benefit of the circles other the traditional “colour in the constituency” election map is that sparsely populated rural areas did not dominate the map. It also means that, when viewing the results from individual parties, that each pixel of each colour represents exactly the same number of votes – whether in central London or the Highlands of Scotland.
The background map is not great at all – a mess of greys and names. At the time, I was strictly keeping colour out of it, so that the only colour was the data being visualised. The early Bike Share Map also had the uninspiring background, with a dark grey river flowing past lighter grey lands. These days I’ve relented – a small amount of colour is OK, as long as the shades are pastel and appropriate, and the key data’s colours are vibrant.
An unexpected recent pleasure was being awarded the Bonington Trophy for Services to Mapping, for 2013, by British Orienteering. It was presented to the club in my absence at the British Orienteering AGM in April, and then presented to me at a club event a couple of weeks ago. Thanks to Angus and my club (SLOW) for nominating me for the trophy and for the detailed and glowing citation! SLOW also won Club of the Year 2013.
The trophy consists of a cleaved fragment of rock collected from the summit of Mount Everest by Sir Chris Bonington, President of British Orienteering, on 21 April 1985; which is embedded in a resin cube and mounted on a wooden rectangular plinth.
* I’m only including the systems where there is publically accessible live (or near-live) data on the number of bikes available for use. This means that most of the large Chinese systems don’t appear – accurate and up-to-date numbers for many of them are hard to obtain, as they either never had live online maps, or, in several cases, the live running information from them has been recently removed. If they were included, and the data from press releases, news articles and other research sources were accurate, then Chinese systems would make up 17 of the top 20, including the top 4.
The Biggest Bike Sharing Cities with Live Bike Numbers (May 2013)
The numbers are coming generally from the monthly recorded max from my Bike Share Map.
* API anticipated appearing soon.
** Not including 400 bikes from a couple of separate systems on the outskirts.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that some “official” information releases overstate the numbers of bikes available – operators may consider bikes that are in docks but broken, in a workshop for repair, or in redistribution vans, to be available for use, whereas I’m counting the maximum recent number of bikes available in docks for people to use at a particular instant. So, for consistency, I’m sticking to the raw statistics that I can see, for the list here.
(I know there’s 22, not 20. I initially missed out Taipei City by mistake, then didn’t have the heart to move out Kaohsiung. Then I found a new datasource for Nantong.)
So Google has released an invitation-based beta of their new Google Maps version for 2013, at their developer conference (I/O) last week. I’ve been trying it out over the last few days. Compare the new version above, with the old version at the bottom of this post.
The good:
The new fonts used look great.
Covering the whole page with the map is great.
The cartography has improved a lot. I particularly like the slighty text buffering, and the subtle shading effects at the edge of areas of water. The world looks a lot more beautiful.
Fewer red pins – now, selected features show up in a bold, dark red font.
The old green and orange road major road colours have just been replaced with yellow and light orange. Much more soothing to the eye.
All vector based, so generally is more responsive (snappier) to use. Zooming in and out is very smooth.
Public transport display is much improved, both with timetables and route option itineraries, and the display of metro/rail networks and “sign” labels along the routes you take for journeys.
Selecting bicycle mode is much more obvious.
The bad:
I cannot specify a specific point on the map any more for a pin – it tends to jump to.
I cannot switch off display of my “home” and “work” points on the map.
I cannot view the (large) map and Street View at the same time, or navigate around the map and have Street View move at the same time.
No Pegman any more! I cannot see what streets are on Street View, except by navigating around Street View itself.
The image carousel at the bottom seems unnecessary and a waste of bandwidth – although it’s easy enough to switch off.
When selecting a POI quite near where I live, Google automatically draws a recommended road route from my home to it, and there seems to be no way to switch this off.
“My Maps” seems to have disappeared.
Terrain view seems to have gone.
Little explanation of symbology or colour meanings – I think this is deliberate, to reduce clutter, but it can be annoying. However key colours do have keys that pop up when needed, e.g. cycle route type, congestion scale.
The internal maps for major buildings (stations, shopping centres) seem to have gone.
You cannot zoom into the aerial imagery as far as before.
There are two few area/district names appearing at many zoom levels, e.g. in central London.
Overall feeling is that Google has stripped away too many features, and made doing anything more than a basic look at the map (or finding directions) a bit harder, requiring long mouse clicks or options that are hidden away.
So it looks prettier, and it’s easier to use. But some key features for me (such as the split screen between map and Street View) have disappeared – hopefully only temporarily – so for day-to-day use I find my self using the old map.
Not long now – less than a month – until the 1 May launch of New York City’s long-awaited and delayed (the hurricane last year didn’t help) bikeshare system, Citi Bike. Stations are starting to be rolled out.
A pilot test is currently being run with some docking stations and bikes, in the Navy Yard area of Brooklyn. I’ve discovered the live data feed for these stations, and combined it with the “planned stations” data feed, to produce a map of the system as it stands, which I’ve added to my Bike Share Map. The live docking stations are in blue/red colours, depending on how full of bikes they currently are, while the planned stations are in grey – dark grey for Phase 1 (launching in May), and light grey for Phase 2 (later this year). The rollout is happened in two phases due to damage inflicted on some of the warehoused bikes caused by the flooding from Hurricane Sandy late last year. Disasters like that kind of put the occasional complaints about the London’s own system into perspective!
London and New York share a common base design for both the bikes and docking stations, so in theory if you were to fly a Boris Bike to NY, it would fit in a dock’s slot – although I presume the system would then reject it for having an alien ID! Both cities’ docking stations and bikes have had design modifications from the Montreal BIXI original, with London’s docking stations being concreted in to the ground while NY’s docking stations have a solar “tower” for power, and a credit-card shaped slot as well as the normal key slot, for future integration with transport smartcards.
One of the most promising parts of the Citi Bike website is the System Data tab – right there on the front page. This looks like NYC will potentially be joining London, Minneapolis, Washington DC and Boston (and possibly Paris soon) in making anonymous journey data available to anyone who wants to analyse it.
About a year ago, I mentioned that I would be spending a bit of time rewriting OpenOrienteeringMap (OOM). The web application, which people use to create printable simple “street orienteering” (or Street-O) maps for use in low-key events such as the SLOW Street-O series events, has been around for a bit, and was not the most intuitive or prettiest application to use.
More seriously, the map creation process had little in the way of safety checking, meaning that mistakes could be made – one recent Street-O event I went to had two control points with the same number, and another one had misaligned the control “clue sheet”, so that the clues corresponded to the wrong control – resulting in much confusion out on the course. There was also a popular complaint from course planners – namely that they couldn’t go back and change their map – if they made one slight misplacement or misnumbering, they would have to start all over again from the beginning. A less frequent but still valid complaint was that it was easy for control numbers to overlap (or be near) other control circles, causing confusion. There was a non-trivial workaround for this last point. The new version, which I’m releasing today as a beta (while it awaits final signoff) addresses all these issues and has a few more features.
If you want to jump right in, then have a play now at http://oomap.co.uk/ – or read on for more details of what’s new.
A list of the main new and updated things:
Much more intuitive to use.
Set a direction for the control number.
Set a point score and control description, for use with the new clue sheet.
Edit and delete controls after they are created.
You can now move the map incrementally (drag the blue move marker.)
Validator to make sure duplicate numbers are not entered!
You now get given a code when saving a map. Copy this code somewhere, and use it to reload your map in the future.
New clue sheet which can be edited and printed – useful in conjunction with the map, for an event.
New design for the PDF maps – with British Orienteering branding.
The standard Street-O map now shows parks (yellow) and forests (light green). If you don’t like them, use Street-O basic, which leaves them out, as well as railways.
Daily updates to the background map.
A note on schedules for updates to the background map, which is created from a local database based on the data in the OpenStreetMap database:
The local database is now updated from OpenStreetMap every day between 6am and 8am. During this time, OpenOrienteeringMap is not available for use – the maps on the website will appear partially or completely blank and PDF generation will not work.
The map data is based on what is in OpenStreetMap up to and including 7pm the previous day.
This means that edits to the background map in OpenStreetMap should take between 13 and 37 hours to appear in OpenOrienteeringMap.
The image “tiles” of the map that you see on the OOM website are created on-the-fly from the local database and cached for quicker future viewing – the cache is emptied daily at the same time as the map data is updated.
The PDF map is always created on-the-fly from the data, and not cached.
The process is subject to occasional delays and may stop altogether for a while if upstream processes/timescales change.
Unfortunately this new version (and the old one) will only be available for the UK (& Ireland) at the moment. Partly this is because the new site is very UK-centric – it searches for UK postcodes, takes advantage of freely available contour line vectors for Great Britain, and is branded as a British Orienteering product. But the main reason is that the OpenStreetMap dataset for the whole world is huge, it’s unwieldy and almost unmanageable – not to mention requiring many hundreds of gigabytes of expensive server disk space, and a lot of RAM. The UK/Ireland cut, on the other hand, is much more straightforward to handle.
You can download this example PDF, which is of Grahame Park in north-west London, here.
Get started making your own Street-O map, at http://oomap.co.uk/. Your comments are, as ever, welcomed below.
[Update – fixed the following bugs: Western Ireland not being rendered, clue sheet labels in the wrong order, not being able to edit a control until at least one is added (problem when loading in a previously saved map), permalinks not using WGS84 lat/lon.]
Here is an animation I created a couple of years ago, one of a number I created for the “Sense and the City” exhibition at the London Transport Museum, which ran from Summer 2011 to Spring 2012. A version of this animation was branded appropriately for the exhibition and shown upstairs in the interactive section. I also created a similar animation of the Barclays Cycle Hire, and colleagues created other map-based visualisations of the moving city.
The animated map shows the touch-ins (going into the network) and touch-outs (leaving the network) of Oyster cards at London’s tube and train stations, including a few beyond the Greater London boundary which still accept Oyster cards. Oyster cards are London’s travel smartcards. As the animation moves forwards in 10-minute intervals during the typical weekday, the balance between touch-ins and touch-outs is shown by a colour scale. Red indicates the great majority of taps are touch-ins, and green indicates mainly touch-outs. White is the “neutral” colour, indicating that roughly as many people are entering the network as leaving it, at that period in time.
I recently headed down the Lea Valley for a short visit to Stratford City (thanks to their Sundays-until-6pm policy when most other large retail areas close at 5pm) and spotted a few changes, + a couple I saw from another recent cycle down the Lee Navigation towpath and one extra one I spotted from reading a newspaper article just now:
Bicycles (but not pedestrians – no pavements) can finally use the Northern Retail Lifeline. Or, at least, I got through on my bike. It might have been because the people at the security box that had always blocked me previously had gone home at that time on a Sunday evening though. The Northern Retail Lifeline is the wiggly link road going from the A12 to Stratford City. This is its official name – it appears on a roadsign at its northern end. Its windy course through the Olympic Park means you get a nice close-up view of a lot of the post-Olympic redevelopment.
Apparently Waterden Way, a more direct access from the north than the Northern Retail Lifeline, will open in May and will include fully segregated bike lanes. Hopefully these will be better than the laughable pavement/cobbled bike lanes surrounding Stratford City as it stands. That is, at road level, straight, and with a step up/down barrier to the traffic. We shall see.
The Velodrome is looking really good as ever.
The area where the Riverbank Arena was (for hockey) is extremly churned up, looking almost apocalyptic.
The shell of the Basketball Arena remains, but is disappearing quite quickly. Same at the Waterpolo Arena.
Most of the seating wings for the Aquatic Centre remain.
The Village Operational Support Area in Leyton has completely disappeared, fence and all.
Most of the rest of the security fence around the Olympic Park remains, including the electric fencing, CCTV and microwave detectors. I understood why it was that extreme before/during the Olympics, and appreciate that the (de)construction needs a decent barrier, but the continuing overbearing nature of it is pretty horrible. They could have least removed the top (electric) bit by now.
The Media Catering Village has also disappeared. I know this doesn’t sound that exciting, but it was a pretty substantial three-story building that I spent up to an hour in during every Gamesmaker shift. Incidentally, like many London 2012 things, it was massively over-specced, I never saw the Gamesmaker area more than 30% full and the press dining areas were never more than 10% full. The MacDonalds underneath was packed though.
The two new pedestrian bridges across the Lee Canal are still looking very unconnected.
Temple Mills Lane is still looking extremely firmly closed, the gate at the eastern end at least shows no sign of opening anytime soon. I had previous thought it might open this spring.
I spotted my first signpost pointing to the “Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park”. It was a cyclists’ signpost and was in Highbury (!).
Stratford City is very busy at 5:45pm on a Sunday evening.
A few other related bits and pieces:
I didn’t get in the ballot for Ride London 100, which will start in the Olympic Park this summer.
Hackney Council want to hold large scale events on Hackney Marshes every summer, following the Hackney Weekend event last June. Personally I can’t think of anything worse. Pretty much the whole marsh was sealed off for a month before, and a couple of weeks after, meaning that my local parkrun event had to be cancelled during that time. I would be more supportive if the setup/takedown process was done in a week or so, but six weeks is just ridiculous. There’s a perfectly good venue being created, less than a mile to the south-east of Hackney Marshes…
So Google Reader is closing this summer. That’s a shame. It’s been my RSS feed reader for many years. I’m currently subscribed to 163 feeds, split across London, Tech, Mac, GIS, InfoVis, financial, orienteering and general. For a while I had a specially crafted Twitter search that fed tweets into Google Reader, but I eventually realised (when this overwhelmed the reader with the volume of tweets coming in) that mixing Twitter and feed reading is not a good idea. They serve slightly different purposes.
One of the feeds I follow has suggested that, if I don’t switch feed reader, then there are other ways to keep updated – weekly email newsletters, Facebook update and Twitter updates. The thing is, none of these get quite the same level of attention: There is a continuum of information that RSS fits into.
Google Reader sits squarely between these other ways I could absorb information, but each has their own problems:
* Email – I normally get about 20-100 a day. These normally get read within a few hours of being sent, and will generally then sit in my inbox until I’ve around to filing them and replying to them – this might be a couple of months in extreme cases. The problem is that as a personal copy of each email has been delivered to you, and takes up (account) space. I feel compelled to just not let it sit there in the inbox forever.
* Google Reader – generally about 20-50 a day. I don’t feel the need to read everything, but I’ll read most recent stories if bored. Probably about 50% get read. if I particularly like a story, I’ll star it – I maybe do this on 1% of stories. But otherwise they just scroll of to the bottom.
* Facebook Updates – Facebook keeps changing the rules and algos, so it’s quite possible that, unless you pay for advertising and prominent placement, your story which you push to a Page that I subscribe to, won’t actually get seen, unless I proactively go to the Page or view my Pages tab which is obscure. It’s not a reliable free way to see content.
* Tweets – I follow around 600 people and so probably get about 2000 a day, i.e. 1-2 a minute – much higher during the afternoon than the morning or night. There’s no way I’ll see everything.
Here’s the best way to the worst way that I will see/know/act on something – the continuum of information.
Face to face – obviously. Unless I’m trying to concentrate on simething else!
Postal mail – it sits on my desk at home filling up space until I do something about it
Phoning me – I can’t miss it but I might forget about it
Tweeting me – unless I’ve done something very popular, these will generally get seen
Mobile texts – require me to either action then, or forget but re-remember
Facebook IM
Work Email – will read and forget, then eventually file/reply
Personal Email – will read and forget, then eventually file/reply
Facebook Mail
DMing me on Twitter – Twitter/clients are starting make this harder to see/remember
FlickrMail
RSS (Google Reader) – Fills an important space – I curated my view, so it is the most likely way I’ll read things that are not specifically directed to me.
Facebook Groups – The most read non-personal content on Facebook, thanks partly to email/text notifications
Facebook Newsfeed – I check it a lot less than Twitter but it’s also less noisy
Twitter Timeline – too many tweets come in and scroll off too quickly
Comment on my blog – thanks to a non-functioning mailserver.
Facebook Pages – stories here tend to not get viewed unless paid-placement
Websites – I actually have to visit them. This doesn’t stop me viewing a few key websites (BBC News, Diamond Geezer, Nopesport, Reddit London are my top four) almost every day.
