The CalTopo blog has been quiet since spring, but that doesn’t mean a lack of progress, much less a lack of work.  Time to take a quick look back at the second half of 2016.

First, the personal front.  CalTopo has been my full-time job since May, and although it’s averaged more than 40 hours per week, I did manage to mix a bit of vacation in.  Some of it traditionally enjoyable:

W Ridge of Pigeon Spire, Bugaboos

And some of it just grueling:

Leading the morning briefing on a campaign search after a full week of 18-20hr days.

However the universal theme for the summer, and the reason for the lack of blog updates, was that I was simply trying to stay afloat.  In between email deluges, that meant tracking down some scaling and performance issues that would always seem to trigger a crash and site outage at the most inconvenient times.

By fall, I had the performance issues sorted out, and decreasing seasonal usage lessened my customer support workload.  So it was time to get cranking on improvements.

Two lines simultaneously open for editing.

The largest of those was a major UI overhaul, moving most editing from modal, bottom-of-screen dialogs to modeless ones that stack up on the side of the screen.  This brought with it a number of improvements, including massive performance increases for large datasets, per-object visibility toggling, simultaneous editing of multiple objects (such as neighboring polygons), instant syncing of line/marker style to the map, and single-step drawing (the old UI required you to choose a style, hit OK, and then start drawing).

Per-object visibility makes it easier to clean up a cluttered map.

The other changes were much smaller but still much-needed.  Auto-drawing now has the option for larger lines (I need to make this the default), which helps prevent the oft-recurring problem of accidentally clicking next to the stream or trail rather than on it.

Auto-drawing with larger line widths.

DEM (digital elevation model) shading allowed the creation of custom shaded layers based on slope angle, elevation and aspect, but required understanding a cryptic syntax (such as s30-60e4000-6000f FF0000).  This has been replaced with a friendlier dialog that allows you to select values from dropdowns and colors from a color picker:

Preferences, such as a user’s preferred datum and coordinate system, used to be stored as a browser cookie.  By storing just an ID cookie and tracking preferences in a server-side database, I can store more information without risking exceeding the cookie size limit.  This allowed me to expand to the print page, remembering a user’s last selected page size, scale, and other features.

WMS and WMTS layers have been supported for a while, but reverse engineering the WMS request syntax was tricky for casual users.  The Add Custom Layer dialog now has an auto-probe option that will talk to a WMS or WMTS endpoint and try to configure the URL template automatically, making it easier to pull more third-party sources into CalTopo, particularly government run servers with a wealth of public domain (but limited geographic coverage) data.

As well as lots of smaller changes not worth listing.  That brings us to about November, when I switched gears and began working on map data instead of features.  Those are for a subsequent post, but suffice to say some exciting changes have recently gone live.

For advanced users, CalTopo offers a number of custom layers: MapBuilder, viewsheds, sunlight, scanned maps, DEM-based shading and third-party WMS and tile sources.  A persistent issue with these layers is that they are tied to either the map you are working on, or the URL of a blank page.  It’s easy to go wild customizing them, and then suddenly find yourself starting from scratch with a new map.

In a long overdue solution, you can now save custom layers to your account.  Every custom layer dialog has a “Save To Account” link at the bottom which adds that layer to your account:

As with maps, these layers are listed on a tab on the account dialog:

And shown in a separate section of either the layer dropdown or the overlay list, depending on how the layer is configured:

Additionally, for subscribers, these layers will show up in your KML SuperOverlay File, or for pro users, WMS or WMTS Service:

A viewshed overlay in Earth

Sunlight analysis viewed in Earth

CalTopo PDFs are now sporting a couple of improvements.

The most noticeable of those is a title input field on the print page:

If filled out, it will show up in a couple places.  On the bottom of the PDF itself:

on the account dialog:

and also in Avenza PDF Maps:

Slightly less noticeable is an improvement in label positioning.  Before, labels were drawn without regard to each other; on a busy map, this resulted in an unreadable mess.  Now, labels will not draw on top of each other.  If two labels conflict, the PDF generator will attempt to move them around (to only few positions; it’s not very smart yet), and if that doesn’t solve the problem, it will omit the second label to improve readability.

Label 2 automatically floated to the left to avoid conflicts.

Finally, although hard to demonstrate on a screen, MapBuilder layers will now print better.  To create high resolution PDFs, CalTopo starts with a large image and then shrinks it down to fit the page.  With layers that look the same at all zoom levels, like USGS map scans, this works great.  With layers that get redrawn at each zoom level, like OpenStreetMap, shrinks all the lines and text down to the point where they’re hard to read.

When you print a MapBuilder layer, the PDF generator will request a tile that’s been scaled up by a custom amount so that lines weights and text will come out looking right.  This is only possible on layers produced in-house, but at some point I may ramp up an OpenStreetMap server so that I can do the same thing with OSM maps.

1:24k PDF created without scaling

1:24k PDF with scaling

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 levels and it’s hard to see trails or read the text.  Often I’ll zoom in to trace out a trail, then zoom out to get the high level picture.

Vogelsang Pass, Yosemite.  At zoom 13, you can barely follow the trails.

Much better.

MB Topo view of the Marin Headlands

MB Aerial rendering of the same spot

MB Topo rendering of Mt Olympus, WA

Custom Grand Canyon map that emphasizes trails.

Custom high-level planning map of Cascade Pass, WA.

Custom map of Logan Pass, Glacier National Park, MT