Simon Willison’s Weblog

OSM static map api. A very welcome addition to the OpenStreetMap world (with plenty of options for overlaying points, polygons etc) slightly marred by the size and relative ugliness of the OpenStreetMap watermark.

# 12th October 2009, 1:37 pm / openstreetmap, mapping, apis, staticmaps, watermarks

Map Maker for Developers. Tiles from Google’s Map Maker crowdsourcing effort are now available in the JS and static maps APIs on an opt-in basis. Maybe I’m misunderstanding something here, but Google Map Maker seems like a big step backwards for open geographic data. People donate their mapping efforts to Google, who keep them—unlike OpenStreetMap, where the donated efforts are made available under a Creative Commons license.

# 21st February 2009, 9:05 am / openstreetmap, googlemapmaker, google, creativecommons, crowdsourcing, google-maps-api, staticmaps

Google Maps Without the Scripting. Google Maps has finally added a simple API for retrieving static map images.

# 4th March 2008, 11:54 pm / staticmaps, mapping, google-maps