Book Image

Mapbox Cookbook

Book Image

Mapbox Cookbook

Overview of this book

Maps are an essential element in today’s location aware applications. Right from displaying earth surface information to creating thematic maps displaying plethora of information, most of the developers lack the necessary knowledge to create customizable maps with combination of various tools and libraries. The MapBox platform is one such platform which offers all the tools and API required to create and publish a totally customizable map. Starting with building your first map with the online MapBox Editor, we will take you all the way to building advanced web and mobile applications with totally customizable map styles. Through the course of chapters we’ll learn CartoCSS styling language and understand the various components of MapBox platform and their corresponding JavaScript API. In the initial few chapters we will dive deeper into the TileMill and MapBox Studio components of MapBox and use them to generate custom styled map tiles and vector maps. Furthermore, we will publish these custom maps using PHP, node.js and third party tools like Geoserver. We’ll also learn to create different visualizations and map styles like a choropleth map, a heat map and add user interactivity using a UFTGrid. Moving on, we dive into advanced concepts and focus on integration with third party services like Foursquare, Google FusionTables, CartoDB, and Torque to help you populate and even animate your maps. In the final chapter we’ll learn to use the Mapbox SDK to create and publish interactive maps for the iOS platform. By the end of this book, you will learn about MapBox GL and how to create a fully functional, location-aware mobile app, using the maps styles created in the recipes.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Mapbox Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Comparing two maps at the same time


In this recipe, we are going to learn how to compare two maps at the same time. We can have two maps that are styled differently and which display different features. For example, one may use street data, while the other may use terrain or satellite imagery. The user will be able to swipe between the two maps.

How to do it…

The following steps need to be performed:

  1. Add an HTML5 slider input control to the DOM.

  2. Add an overlay map layer at the top of the base layer.

  3. Calculate the clipping point based on the slider input value.

  4. Create a rect, and apply that to the clip CSS property of the map container.

We first create an overlay map, and add it at the top of the base map. Next, we use a simple HTML5 input control, a range slider. As the user drags the slider, the overlay map gets clipped. All the magic happens in CSS. We have an overlay layer already in place, and we clip it based on the input value of the range slider. The CSS property that we are tweaking on...