MapQuest Devblog

As we get closer to the final 5.3 release, we just rolled-out Release Candidate 4 of our 5.3 JavaScript, AS3, and FUJAX APIs. The major update this time: the addition of more features for adding traffic information into your application. We've also added traffic documentation and code samples for those of you who like that sort of thing.

More details on the Developer Network Beta page, but here's a quick rundown of the updates:

• You can now set minimum and maximum zoom levels on POIs. The POI would then only be visible on the map between the specified zoom levels.
• You can now add traffic incident POIs to your map.
• You can now add traffic flow to your map.
• Retrieve item by key from collection or map: You can now get a shape back out of the map, or any collection, by using it's Key property.
• Get reference to a Shape's parent collection: You can now ask a shape to tell you all the different ShapeCollections it is in

Happy trafficking!
Hrmm... that didn't come out quite the way I intended.

Continuing our string of weekly trade show announcements, we'd like to let you know that MapQuest is a Platinum Sponsor of and will be attending the annual Where 2.0 Conference being held next week in Burlingame, CA from May 12^th to the 14^th. (For those of you not familiar with the Valley, the show is right outside the San Francisco Airport.)

If you're attending the show, stop by and tell us what you're working on and how MapQuest can help.

MapQuest will be in attendance at JavaOne being held next week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA. You can visit us in the Pavilion at booth #1124; a number of the MapQuest Developers will also be running around and attending sessions. Feel free to stop and talk with us.

MapQuest will be out in Santa Clara, CA this week attending the Location Intelligence conference. We have a booth set-up and will be happy to demo and discuss the MapQuest Platform with you.

Hope to see you there!

Developer David Bello has written a great plug-in for AIM called "Share-a-Map." That clever name may have something to do with why we're covering it here.

Right from the copy in the AIM Gallery:

Share-a-map is an AOL AIM plugin that let you share maps with a friend via AIM in an interactive way. This plugin can be extremely useful when you want to share a location, route or place with a friend or relative, plus other features like add images and hand drawing overlays, find an address or point, save your map, among others.

We've been playing with it here in the office and it is a really sweet way to do some map collaboration.

The Share-a-Map plug-in is Windows only and available in the AIM Plugin Gallery.

Earlier this month we told you about a "Great Mashup using APIs from Ribbit, Kayak, and MapQuest" by Andrew Powell, shamelessly plugging it to help him win a Wii.

Well, not only did Andrew win the 306|Flex API Contest and the Wii, he also won some help restyling the UI.

Check out the restyled and award-winning Ribbit, Kayak, MapQuest Hotel Search Mashup. Congrats Andy!

"Ribbit / MapQuest / Kayak Mashup" is the title of a post by Andrew Powell from Universal Mind, introducing a great hotel search app he built using APIs from (big surprise!) Kayak, Ribbit, and our very own AS3 API.

Give it a read and check out Andrew's hotel search app. We also support shameless promotion, so help Andrew win a Wii by voting for his application on the 360|Flex Contest Page.

Alltop is a site that creates category "dashboards" of "all the top" sites on the Internet in both tech and non-tech related categories. They just launched a category for programming information at http://programming.alltop.com. The MapQuest Developer Blog is among the helpful programming resources listed.

Our thanks to Alltop! Give the site a look.

This morning we released an update to the MapQuest JavaScript API. Version 5.3, Release Candidate 3 contains the following new functionality:

• Drop Shadow setting for the map: We've added a visual drop-shadow graphic to the map, that you can turn on by calling map.setMapShadowState(boolean). This shadow is off by default.
• Remote Collections: KML and GeoRSS support built into the API! Create a RemoteCollection, tell it the location of the feed and its format, and watch it get automagically sucked onto the map! If you have another format, feel free to extend the feed loading classes to create your own loadable formats.
• Min/Max Zoom levels on POIs: You can now set minimum and maximum zoom levels on POIs. The POI would then only be visible on the map between the set zoom levels.
  poi.setValue('minZoomLevel', x) poi.setValue('maxZoomLevel', x)
• Show Traffic Flow on the Map: You can now add traffic flow to your map. This is the first step of adding traffic functionality into the API - more will follow.
• Show Traffic/Incident POIs on the Map: You can now add traffic incident POIs to your map. This is the second step of adding traffic functionality into the API - more will follow.

Are you starting to see a pattern here?

To use this version, change the version parameter in the API request to "v=5.3.0_RC3":
<script src="http://btilelog.access.mapquest.com/tilelog/ transaction?
transaction=script&key=YOUR_KEY_HERE&ipr=true&itk=true
&v=5.3.0_RC3" type="text/javascript"></script>

This morning we released an update to our JavaScript API. Version 5.2.1 uses DOJO 1.0.2, which fixes a bug in the original DOJO 0.9.0 GFX library that could cause line overlays to "jump" at certain zoom levels. If you do not use overlays in the 5.2 version of the JavaScript API, you do not need to make any changes.

To update, simply change the version parameter to "v=5.2.1":
<script src="http://btilelog.access.mapquest.com/tilelog/ transaction?
transaction=script&key=YOUR_KEY_HERE&ipr=true&itk=true& v=5.2.1" type="text/javascript"></script>