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| Easily find your way around campus with the new interactive map |
With the new map, you can really quickly find any department, building or any of around 150 locations across campus. As well as departments and buildings, you can also see University services and facilities, colleges, cafés, bars, restaurants, shops, cash machines and car parks. So no more excuses for being lost around campus.
Within each category you also have the option to see all locations, useful for things like cafes and cash machines where you just want an idea of what's nearby.
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| "Show all" lets you see all the locations for any given category. Here's all the places to eat and drink on Heslington West |
Anyone who has used Google Maps before will be familiar with the interface, which allows you to easily pan and zoom around the campus, and works great across all sorts of mobile devices.
Because we're using the Google Maps interface, you can switch to a satellite view of the campus and see what it looks like from above.
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| Looking down on the University lake with satellite view |
In some parts of campus, you can also drag the orange "pegman" onto the map to enter Street View and see what the buildings look like.
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| Street View of Heslington Hall, home to Web Office HQ |
Other improvements
We've made improvements to the rest of our maps and directions pages too, giving them a general tidy-up and have added a journey planner to campus, powered by Google Maps.
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| Get driving directions to campus from pretty much anywhere |
Still to come
This is the first version of the interactive map, and there's plenty more to come in the near future. At the top of our list we've got:
- Searching for locations by typing in their name, rather than browsing a list
- Walking and cycling directions between any two locations on campus
- Clickable pins to provide extra information about a location - such as an image of the building, links to websites, opening times
- Bus stops with live information about when the next bus is due
We're keen to hear what you all think would be most useful, so please let us know in the comments or via our feedback form.
We're really grateful to YUSU for sharing some of the work that they did for the map in the YUSU iPhone app. This gave us a great head start and meant that we could do this a lot quicker than we would have done otherwise.
Check
I was interested to see that you bootstrapped from an SU app? Are you familiar with the LNCD initiative at Lincoln ( http://lncd.lincoln.ac.uk/ ) which resonates strongly with this approach? FWIW, I think you had a few student developers attend the DevXS ( http://devxs.org/ ) student developer conference; are you in touch with them? (If not, maybe worth trying to track them down?)
ReplyDeletePS your Comment as: login thing is borked???
The YUSU work that we stood on the shoulders of was mostly their sterling effort last year to populate OpenStreetMap with campus data. This went from showing a mostly greenfield campus to fully populated as they worked on their iPhone app. They also kindly shared some building location data with us which saved us having to locate quite so many places.
ReplyDeleteWe're nothing like as joined-up as the LNCD approach, but that looks like a great initiative.
Not sure about the comment thing playing up unfortunately - it's just standard Blogger so I don't think there's much I can do. Fingers crossed it's behaving again now.
This is really great. Can we embed it (e.g., in departmental sites)?
ReplyDeleteSo you're using OpenStreetMap data with Google Maps?!
ReplyDelete@Tom Hartley, not yet I'm afraid. We're working on enabling deep-linking to the map (ie. so that you can link straight to a view of a location). We'll consider embedding in the future, but it's not there just yet.
ReplyDelete@Anonymous, yes, all the map data is OSM, piped through a service called Cloudmade and into a Google Maps interface. Full details on our follow-up post: http://yorkwebteam.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/behind-scenes-of-our-new-map.html
Maybe you can create a CMS component that we can incorporate?
ReplyDelete@Tom Hartley, yes if we do make an embeddable version then we'd probably do it via a CMS template, but no concrete plans yet.
ReplyDeleteYour campus map is a big help! I like the user interface, the green color is cool. By the way, please update us about the upcoming clicble pins and bus stops indicator. Thanks in advance.
ReplyDelete@Jasmin glad you like it! We're planning on working on some improvements to the map in a few weeks time, which may include the clickable pins and bus information.
ReplyDeleteThis is brilliant, thank you- glad to see this positive move! One concern that a number of students have brought up with me is whether we might be able to include wheelchair and guide dog accessible routes, for those students who might need to take a different route across the campus, and/or might need to use lifts throughout stages of their journey.
ReplyDeleteAlso, can this map be updated when a route or bridge is closed because of repairs? That would massively help as well.
But thank you, and I really think this is a positive move forwards!
Bob Hughes,
YUSU.
@Bob thanks for the feedback - I've sent you an email about what we might be able to do around showing accessible routes around campus.
DeleteReally like your maps implementation.
ReplyDeleteWhat version of the Google API are using and do you have any concerns about the Google Maps API usage limits?
Your daily traffic may be below these limits or perhaps you have a non-profit type agreement. Just curious!
Thanks Steven, glad you like it.
DeleteWe're using v3 of the API. We're generally seeing only a few hundred views of the map per day so are well under the limit 25,000 maps loads per day. We'd expect to see some peaks around graduation, open days and the start of term, but even then I think we'll be well within the limit.