Some notes from the CloudMade launch

I made a flying visit after work yesterday to CloudMade’s product launch in Holborn. Obviously the OpenStreetMap angle interests me personally, but I’m also interested from a waterway mapping perspective. So here are a few disconnected thoughts on both the launch and the products.

Cartography

Three new styles were unveiled, courtesy of Stamen Design: ‘Fresh’ is classic cartography with a understated design sensibility, ‘Pale Dawn’ a mashup-friendly fade-out so you can cram in moar pushpins, and ‘Midnight Commander’ – well, that was the gee-whiz launch of the evening (though it doesn’t appear to be live at time of writing). Will be used for precisely nothing sensible ever, but it’s great to see how a piece of imaginative cartography can seize people’s imaginations. Really encouraged to see these.

CM’s own enhanced ‘Original’ style is a good derivative of classic OSM, with added POI icons making it a good fit in urban areas. I’m a little underwhelmed by the ‘Tourist’ style, but again, it probably works better in urban areas than out here in the countryside, where the choices at each scale don’t really gel.

(Going to London always makes me feel like such a bumpkin: you know, country chap turns up in Barbour jacket and has to buy one of these strange Oyster card things. Where have all these people come from? Why is every inch of space devoted to trying to sell me stuff? Why are the pubs all shit?)

One little detail I appreciated: not all the typefaces are Deja Vu. There’s a very, very slight sprinkling of something Helvetica-like. Little steps, little steps. (Incidentally, why isn’t anyone designing better shields for Mapnik? The current ones are the weakest part of OSM’s cartography.)

Then there’s the Style Editor, where you can take one of these styles and play with it. The user interface is really nicely done and the apply-refresh-apply cycle is tolerably fast, though obviously not as nippy out in the real world as it was at the demo.

It’s not really a serious cartographic tool, and doesn’t try to be: you can’t adjust the line weights or casing colours, for example. But Peter Campbell would have loved it, as it’s essentially a whole webapp devoted to changing the fockin’ colours; and the word that kept cropping up in the presentations was “brand”. In other words: dear MegaCorp, we offer you the chance to get maps on your website with the same palette as the rest of your design guidelines. And since you’re a MegaCorp, you’ll be punting out several zillion tile impressions a day, so may we introduce you to our keenly-priced serving plans? Follow the money.

Anyway, despite that, here’s something I knocked up in 15 minutes. Pretty basic, but it shows how immediate the whole process is. I don’t think I’ll be returning to the Style Editor much in its current incarnation – I’m too much of an Illustrator weenie for that and it doesn’t really give the control I’d want for a custom canal map. But it’s good fun.

One footnote, and this isn’t a criticism aimed at CM in particular, but OSM in general: I think Steve Chilton deserves some more public credit. Most OSM cartography ultimately derives from the osm.xml file which he lovingly tends and keeps in good cartographic order despite the ever-present pleading to add more POIs, more ridiculous tags (smoothness, designated etc.), more Multi-Coloured Swap Shop landuse, and so on. Everyone knows that OSM maps are rendered with Mapnik, but not many know of the essential link between Mapnik and OSM data.

Routing

CM’s map website has also added routing. Now the big push at the event was that “it’s not just routing, it’s a routing API”, and I can see that. People are going to love hacking on this. In particular, I hope Andy adds it very very quickly to OpenCycleMap, because OSM is getting a lot of traction in cycling circles at the moment, and this is going to push people over the edge.

And the reason why: the cycle routing has the makings of being brilliant. It’s the one product from the evening that I can see myself using often. Ask it for a route from A to B, and it’ll find one that uses the NCN where possible, but not religiously; one that follows minor roads in preference to trunk roads; and one which, despite all that, is reasonably direct. 

It works pretty well. If I ask it for a route from Charlbury to Burton, for example, it heads north to Enstone, hugs minor roads parallelling the ‘3400 up to Shipston, then follows NCN5 as far as Redditch – where, very sensibly, it takes a detour on RR55 into southern Birmingham to avoid the schlep via Bromsgrove. Then it’s a mix of NCN, minor roads and canal towpath into Burton. An appropriate and enjoyable route, all in all.

It does like B-roads a little too much: certainly here in the Cotswolds, the B-roads tend to have loonies in 4×4s whizzing along them at silly-mph. Conversely, there was some chat at the event that it shouldn’t be quite so scared of trunk roads; if it’s a choice between 200m on a trunk road and 10 miles on a minor one (or, worse, “no route”), most cyclists will grit their teeth and go for the trunk road.

Edit (Tues 17 Feb): the weighting appears to have been tweaked and it actually looks worse to me. Charlbury to Birmingham, for example, now basically follows the A3400 for most of the way, only diverging significantly after Henley-in-Arden. Perhaps, just as the road directions have “Fastest” and “Shortest” options, there should be “Touring route” and “Commuter route” options for cycling.

The major thing that needs enhancing is the textual directions, which are rudimentary to say the least. They take OSM data a bit too literally, so when a road ‘flares’ on the approach to a roundabout, you get told to take a ’slight left’ or to ‘continue’ for 26m. An example of its over-literal approach:

Now strictly speaking that is, indeed, the way to get out of Charlbury through Enstone, but it’s not very easy to follow. This would be better:

Follow B4022 for 4.6km
In Enstone, cross A44 (slight right/left)
Continue on B4022 for 0.8km
Turn left and follow unclassified road for 0.3km
Cross B4030 (slight left/right)
Follow unclassified road for 23.6km 

And of course, for cycle routing, it should tell you which NCN route you’re on. Maybe this’ll happen when (pretty please) it arrives at OpenCycleMap.

But generally, for a fresh-out-of-beta launch and considering the limitations of the OSM data, the routing is very good indeed. On which subject, Steve asked me to pass on to Fake Steve that he thought taking the piss out of incomplete data was out-of-order. I said I’d pass it on to Fake Steve next time I saw him. So, Fake Steve, consider yourself told off.

Speaking of incomplete data…

Some numbers paraded by the speakers: most of Western Europe is going to be complete by the end of 2010, the UK by the end of 2009, OSM is pushing at 100,000 users already and will have a million by the end of 2010. I think I’ve remembered those right. Oh, and it’s going to be a $100 billion market.

Other stuff

These are the two areas I was most interested in. A quick flick around the rest: some APIs, sadly no Perl, AS3 is a third-party component. Location management will either be massive or astronautical – some hints that there’s much more to come on this. More CM launches at Where 2.0, apparently. Mobile stuff isn’t really my bag as I doubt any of it will work on a £9.50 PAYG phone, but hey.

Apparently CM’s business model is along the lines of: charge for large-scale tile serving; some advertising on maps (with a revenue sharing deal with developers, is that right?) by partnering with existing ad networks. I think. Certainly you can’t fault their ambition – though as someone pointed out, there are lots of Atlantic flights to be paid for. I presume they’re going to need a second round of VC.

Lots of big guys there – DCLG,  Yahoo, Google, Intel (I think) – and comparatively few OSM hackers.

Third-party demos: Where Can I Live? is a very neat idea nicely executed. MapMeat (sorry, mapme.at) takes the smart approach of working with services that you already use, which – with a bit of polish and a few UI tweaks – may be enough to carve out a hefty Twitter-sized niche in a space that others are looking keenly at. Also, when I click “home”, it tells me “Yay, home, don’t forget to feed the cat”, which has got to be good. Apart from the fact the cat is currently in the cattery.