Seriously, everyone should read The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. He’s on the £20 note, so he must be good, right?
After almost a year working in the finance industry in London, what I learned was that the Tube is so late so often that you can read quite a lot of books. One of the books was The Wealth of Nations, which is a very well-thought-out argument for free markets. Steve has kept arguing that free markets were A Good Thing for pretty much as long as I’ve known him, but nothing convinced me as well as Adam Smith’s extremely plausible reasoning.
Anyway, long story short: read it – despite its age, it is very good.
August 29th, 2008
After a bit of a quick and dirty hack, there is now a version of Mapnik capable of rendering SVG icons directly to the Cairo back-end. The result is a lovely print-quality map, such as this. Sadly, when I try to load it KPDF crashes. Xpdf is OK, but I don’t know about other renderers… I thought they were all based on poppler these days anyway.
I’ll spend some time cleaning up the new additions and hopefully this’ll make its way into Mapnik’s trunk real soon now.
August 20th, 2008
The icons seemed popular, so here are the original SVGs licensed under the CC-BY-SA license. Enjoy!
August 15th, 2008
I’ve been spending some free time trying to design an icon set for OpenStreetMap. There are several design goals for this icon set:
- They need to work, or nearly work, in black and white as well as colour. This is so they could be used in printed low-colour or greyscale maps.
- They should be visually identifiable by POI class, for rapid readability.
- They should all be the same size and “weight”, so that no single icon overwhelms the others.
You can grab the icons here, version 0.1, with icons for the following POIs; airports, ATMs, bars, cafés, parking, pubs, recycling points, restaurants, bus stops, places of worship (Buddhist temples, Christian churches, Jewish synagogues, Muslim mosques) and supermarkets.
I’ve tried to keep the icon design consistent by using the same rounded-square outline for all the icons at 16×16 pixels. Each different class uses a different flat background colour, chosen to be distinct from all the others (although I should probably check they’re OK for colour-blind people). The icon classes are totally arbitrary, but I’ve been working with the following:
- Blue: transport.
- Orange: Food, drink and socialising.
- Green: Services and shops.
- Grey: Religious points-of-interest.
- Red: Emergency services.
All of the icon strokes are drawn in white on top and are supposed to be internationally recognisable, though some don’t quite live up to that. The pub icon, for example, shows the “nonic” style of pint glass which is common in the UK, but probably not elsewhere. On the other hand, the concept of a “pub” isn’t itself international, so maybe it doesn’t matter. There is an icon for a bar, when this is more appropriate, but I don’t think we have many of them tagged at the moment.
This screenshot shows how different the map looks when POIs like restaurants and cafés are rendered. Hopefully if these are rendered on a layer of the main map more people will start to tag these kinds of features.
Compare the above with the original, which looks rather barren by comparison:
Feedback, requests and suggestions are welcome. The set is still at a very early stage and is missing many icons, but I hope to make it complete at some point in the not-too-far future.
August 13th, 2008