Of course, while Lex is a useful and complete mapping application, it is really only a starting point. The information provided in the freely available populated places dataset doesn't make for a particularly interesting set of landmarks, and our application is still quite basic. Here are some suggested improvements you could make to the Lex application:
Add a Search action, where the user can type in the name of a feature and Lex will zoom and pan the map to show that feature.
Let the user choose any two landmarks, and display the distance between those two points in both kilometers and miles.
Allow the user to load their own set of landmarks, either from a shapefile or an Excel spreadsheet. When loading from a shapefile, the user could be prompted to select the attribute(s) to display for each feature. When loading data from a spreadsheet (using, for example, the
xlrd
library), the various columns would contain the latitude and longitude values as well...