Monday, June 10th, 2013 at 1:55 pm by ba3 — Category: Demo News Tools

At the OpenStreetMap 2013 conference this past weekend, BA3 announced its new MapShop product for vector file definition, creation and publishing. MapShop is a desktop application that solves one of OSM’s thorniest problems in a most elegant way.

Imagine that you want to create an app that uses maps on iOS, Android or Windows8, and you want to do it using vectors from places like OSM, Esri Shape files, GeoJSON, etc. What you need is a tool that will let you bring the data onto the screen easily so that you can select what you want to see, and then the tool needs to create a compact vector file containing your data.

So for example you have a big PostGIS database that contains the complete OSM image. With BA3′s MapShop, you can easily:

1. select which features you want to extract from the OSM database for which areas (example: highways, parks, golf course, walking trails, etc.)…
2. then style those features (example: choose the colors for the roads and golf courses at various zoom levels)…
3. and then view your selections and styling on-screen in real time with Mapshop.
4. When you are happy with your selections, you can publish your vector file. Because it is vectors, the file is quite compact…
5. then you can display your vector file in iOS, Android and OSX apps using BA3′s Altus Mapping Engine.

Never before has the extraction of data from the OSM database been this fluid and this easy. MapShop is an OSX desktop application that makes it incredibly simple to work with the OSM database and create your own customized vector maps (see this post for instructions on getting started with OSM data on Mapshop). You can save the vector files that you create with MapShop on the device, or put them on a server for the device to stream from in real time.

The best part is that MapShop is very easy to use. You can create views that look like this with MapShop:

Or this:

Then you can display the vector file you create in MapShop with an iOS, Android or Windows8 app very easily. Here is Houston on an Android device:

[See this post for instructions on getting started with OSM data on Mapshop]

MapShop works with other vector sources as well, including Esri shape files and GeoJSON. Need something else? Please contact us.

You will be amazed by the speed, flexibility and ease of use that MapShop provides. You will look at OSM maps in a new way, because never before has it been so easy to create your own compact vector files and then publish them on the iOS and Android platforms.

We would love to talk with you about your project. See this post for instructions on getting started with OSM data on MapShop.