Tuesday, February 22, 2005

 

Dallas/Fort Worth CityMAP Now Available

At a whopping 9+MB for the Magellan version the newest CityMAP is now available for download (Garmin version will be available shortly). This is the first CityMAP to include 2 counties of data (Dallas and Tarrant). The data is from the North Texas Council of Governments (NTCOG: goto dfwmaps.com to see what the data looks like in a webmap).

I also tried something new with this CityMAP by including Trail POI data from the USGS. The trail information is not very complete so don't get your hopes up. Basically if the trail is labeled on a USGS QUAD map *AND* someone was able to tell where the trail started, a coordinate was assigned to the POI (about 10% of the trails only).

Another unique "feature" of the data was that the roads had no attributes denoting if it was a freeway, major road, or a street like the other counties have had. This prevented me from applying road type color, style, and thickness to the base (most accurate) road layer. Therefore, I added 2 additional road layers, freeways and major roads, that turn on and off at different zoom levels. The net effect of this is when you zoom in to the detail levels, all the roads and freeways will look the same. When you zoom out far enough the base road layer turns off and the freeways and major roads turn on.

Garmin maps do not have the capability to turn off layers at detail zoom levels so it will likely show 2 versions of each freeway and major road, one on top of the other.

BTW, Thanks to your donations I purchased a registered copy of the 3rd party Garmin translator I will soon be able to provide more advanced features (like the Magellan version) for Garmin users. To be 100% comparable I would need to purchase the $300 version which is probably not feasible. The good news is that I have also discovered another 3rd party Garmin translator to investigate. Great, another steep learning curve for me ;-]

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