[Xastir] Xastir Digest, Vol 55, Issue 4

[Lee Bengston]

On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 4:50 PM, Jerry Dunmire <jerry at dunmire.org> wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm new to the group and new to the internals of xastir, but with the
> TIGER/Online resource gone I've taken advantage of the open-source for
> Xastir to see what I could do.
>
> Google is a problem because their usage policy does not allow caching.
> Several other standalone applications (viking comes to mind) have had
> to stop using Google maps for just that reason.
>
> OSM is possible. While IANAL, the Creative Commons license OSM is
> using for the maps and map data appears to be compatible with xastir.
> However, the CPU/network bandwidth for OSM is limited (at least
> compared to Google) and they therefore have restrictions on the use of
> their servers. I think xastir falls within those restrictions; see:
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_usage_policy.
>
> I have been trying to use the StaticMap
> (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/StaticMap) interface to OSM, with
> some success. I have modeled the code on the map_tiger.c file and I am
> successfully downloading and displaying OSM maps from within xastir.
> However, I have had to hack the scaling because OSM has a limited
> number of levels.
>
> If anyone is interested, I would be happy to share my patches.

Jerry,

To think your message above came in Tues afternoon, and by mid day the
next day we could grab the update from CVS.  I'm extremely impressed.
Heck, I didn't even get a chance to post the "Maybe the Tiger map
server being taken out of service will be a postive" message before
this was done.  Sure there are some things to be done with scaling,
etc., but it's still one heck of a first cut.

I'm also very happy for those outside of the US that have access now
to a global online map capability.

Thanks so much, and thanks to Curt as well for integrating the changes so fast.
Lee