I’ve never been happy with CalTopo’s reliance on USGS 7.5′ topo scans. While I expect them to remain the gold standard in backcountry navigation for years to come, in some places they’re quite out of date. Even when they aren’t, it’s difficult to use them for high level trip planning – zoom out a couple […]
While I don’t expect this news to be greeted with thundering applause, CalTopo subscriptions are now live. Based on feedback from y’all, I moved to a two-tier pricing model: You can still create, share and print maps for free, but prints will be limited to 5 pages of 8.5×11 and KMZ and MBTiles exports will […]
In preparation for subscriptions and credit card handling, CalTopo now supports secure https connections. Because all requests from an https page must also be in https, there are a few features that don’t work quite right yet, most noticeably the land management, fire activity and fire history layers, but that’s all I’ve found so far. […]
I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about the future of CalTopo. While I’d love to claim that I started with some kind of genius original vision, the truth is that it started as an offshoot of a hobby project I’d been working on for SAR, and grew organically from there. As with any […]
At 8pm on Tuesday, I got paged out for a typically inconvenient mutual aid SAR: pack everything I need for a 72-hour deployment, sleep a couple hours, wake up at 3:45, drive 6 hours, fly into the middle of the Sierra backcountry, and hike out 40 miles. Thanks for the lift, SEKI H-552 When I […]
Since the beginning, CalTopo has had the ability to make maps publicly visible, i.e. someone can find the map without knowing its URL. However all this did was add the map to an obscure page that few visited other than Google. Today that changes with the introduction of the shared maps layer. It’s available as an overlay […]
Elevation profiles are one of the few remaining gaps people have noticed when comparing CalTopo to desktop software. No more. There are now two profile modes – the existing interactive one that uses Google elevation data, and a full-page version that builds on the terrain statistics dialog with CalTopo sourced elevation data. You can get to the […]
CalTopo now has a source for NOAA weather stations – some are in standard airport and urban locations, but a number of others are in quasi-backcountry locations useful for trip planning. Note that the data is screen-scraped off of a web page rather than coming through a documented web service, so it may be less […]
One of CalTopo’s core features has always been the ability to blend multiple map layers together. Until now, that’s been done by creating a layer stack and varying the opacity of each layer to suit. This works, but shaded relief has always been a weak point. In order to keep the relief layer from washing […]
CalTopo just gained a redesigned user interface. Normally I hate invasive UI rewrites, and I’m sure this one won’t please everyone. However, over time it’s become apparent that CalTopo’s previous long-standing UI had too many obscure and confusing features. It was painful watching people struggle with the same issues over and over, and while I […]
