MapQuest Devblog

In this post I will continue my discussion of overlays in the MapQuest JavaScript API 5.2. My last two posts covered a couple of methods for adding rollover functionality to overlays. Over the next couple of posts I will discuss some of the options that are available when working with image overlays.

There are a few things that set image overlays apart from the other overlay types. The one that poses the biggest obstacle is image resolution. Since an image overlay is "pinned" to a map with Lat and Lng coordinates, there is a significant difference in resolution required to display an image properly at different zoom levels. If this becomes an issue for your application, one of the options that is available is the setImageOverlayLevels method provided by the API.

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>