MapQuest Developer Network Blog

Last week, we released some really great new stuff for the MapQuest Platform: address point geocoding data for the United States for our Enterprise Edition customers, a new default static map style for all SDK users and Navteq United States street level geocoding data for our Free Edition folks!

Address Point Geocoding

Address Point Geocoding (APG) data for the MapQuest Platform is a great win for our customers - enabling more accurate placement of your location on the map and improved routing as well. Using APG is easy - it's already built into our default geocoding configuration, so you don't have to change any configuration files or code - we're returning exact matches with APG using L1AAA as the quality code and "ntus_strpt" as the vendor name for Enterprise Edition versions 5.* and older, P1AAA for the new geocoding service SDK's and two sets of latitude/longitude pairs that show the parcel center and snap-to-street latitude/longitude. You can read more about APG in a blog post we did last year: "APG now in Beta Geocoding Service."

Here are a couple samples using the APG data - red star is interpolated location, blue star is center of parcel and green star is using APG:

New Map Styles

In December 2009, we released the new map styles for our tiled maps that included terrain - we now have the same great new style for our static (or dynamic) maps. If your static maps are using an older map style, you can simply change your code to use "2k9a" as your new map style. If you're already using the default map style - you've already been upgraded, nothing to do on your side! If your business model includes printing static maps - we suggest using a high DPI raster image setting in order to capture the lakes/terrain data with the new map styles. Want to know more? Read: "MapQuest Introduces our New Map Styles and More!"

A sample new static (dynamic) map:

Free Edition Geocoding Update

And finally, we're very proud to announce that Navteq United States street level geocoding for Free Edition has replaced the older TIGER (Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing) data that is freely available from the United States Census Bureau. Navteq populates and verifies their data by driving the roads as well as through user generated updates to that data; TIGER data is updated much less frequently. We're happy to provide the same level of quality data that our Enterprise and Developer Edition applications have been using for years via the MapQuest Platform!

Dump your Garmin! No, I don't mean getting rid of your Garmin, so don't go chucking it out the window just yet. I'm referring to dumping the data from the .gpx file your Garmin device utilizes to store location and route information.

A co-worker of mine recently asked me to write an app that reads a Garmin's .gpx file and displays the waypoints and the route on a map. Never having seen a .gpx file (I'm a TomTom boy, myself) I was pretty sure it would include all the basics - lat/lng, name, etc, etc. I found what I was expecting in the file, not much to it, it's fairly simple.

You can view the sample app here. Viewsource is enabled on the sample so you can see the code involved in it. To sum it up, I used an HTTPService to read the file, array collections (I know they're heavy and slow, but they're easy), and looped through the collections displaying the waypoints and route on the map. If you're at all familiar with placing POIs and routes on MapQuest's maps, the whole process is fairly simple.

One other thing: On MapQuest.com, by using the Garmin Communicator Plug-in, you can output map and directions info into a .gpx format using the "Send to GPS" option in the "Send To" menu.

Hope this helps some one! If you threw your Garmin out the window in the first paragraph, neither MapQuest nor I are responsible.

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.