In 1854 physician John Snow used Voronoi-like diagrams to figure out an infected water pump in London. However, a less dark use case of Voronoi diagrams is simply figuring out service areas, also known as catchment areas, for things like schools, stores, and hospitals. Simply, a service area polygon shows what point is closest to you. We have no brought the ability to create these types of maps to Scribble Maps! To create a Voronoi diagram follow these steps. Step 1 Create some markers and put them inside of a folder. Step 2 Open operations and analysis and click "Service Areas." Step 3 Select the folder and click "Create Polygons." Optionally, you can click the checkbox for random colours.  That's it! You can now start doing other things like moving polygons, changing styles, or doing further analysis. We hope you enjoy this new feature!

Route optimization also known as the travelling sales person problem (TSP) is a type of routing to figure out which order you should visit locations in the fastest time possible. As you can imagine this is very useful if you need to drop off packages, do movie location scouting, make sales calls to a physical location, or need to do routine inspections. Well we are happy to announce that this functionality has now come to Scribble Maps. For demonstration purpose we have selected a bunch of different cafes in the Toronto region. Let's pretend that in the course of a day or multiple days you want to visit all of them. Here is a picture of the original points. Unoptimized Points From here we going to go to our Operations & Analysis panel and select Create > Optimized Route. Next you will want to select your start location, end location, and the way points folder that contains the points in your route. After clicking "Create Optimized Route" your ...

For the last few days we you might of noted that Scribble Maps has not performing like it usually does. We are used to high volume situations it happens regularly but when a map was used to show the locations of Corona Virus cases in Italy on a large Italian news site we got hit with traffic we had never seen before. Serious traffic. So serious we waited to capture this milestone. It's unfortunate that this milestone was caused by something like the Corona virus and we wish we would of hit this milestone for something else. This couldn't of came at a worse time because we were in the middle of doing infrastructure updates and we were about to deploy an update right before this hit. We provide unlimited map views for our widgets so there was nothing stopping the traffic. Our map would go on to be seen by over a million people. This was a learning experience for us so over the last couple weeks we have pulled some over time and not only did complete re-writes to handle th...

We recently rolled out a large new feature to Scribble Maps called Data filtering. This allows you to quickly filter spreadsheets such as XLS, CVS, or just attributes you add yourself. To those unfamiliar with data filtering and GIS it might be a bit intimidating at first but data filtering is nothing more than showing data that you want to see based on specific conditions. We use data filtering all the time for ourselves. For instance when we are picking a hotel and want to see the ones with the highest ratings or ones that are in a certain price range. Both of these are examples of data filtering. The cool thing about Data Filtering in Scribble Maps is that once you define filters they can be used on our share view by others. When others are viewing your map they can turn on and off filters for the map to get to the data they are looking for. In order to filter data in Scribble Maps an overlay such as a marker or a shape needs to have an attribute. Attributes can either be ad...

Web Map Services (WMS) are a way of sharing geo data across many platforms. Usually using WMS requires a lot of skill or advanced GIS tools but with Scribble Maps you can add them quickly and easily to your map. If you are a GIS professional you can use Scribble Maps to quickly layer WMS layers on the map and then even add your annotations on top. For this post we are going to use  https://www.weather.gov/gis/WebServices  which is repository of government weather data. First select the layer you want to add to Scribble Maps. Next, Click "WMS" Next You will want to copy the entire WMS URL. Now visit the Scribble Maps editor add click the "+" button in the bottom right next to Base Layers. Next select "Add WMS" Now paste your URL into "WMS URL" select your layer and then hit "Add WMS Layer" Close the window and you will now see the WMS layer added to your Scribble Map! The great part of WMS layer...

Travel Time Maps can be used for Everyday Planning  Few things get us as excited as the thought of time travel. Where would you go, and who would you meet if you had the ability to go back in time? What if you had the ability to plan exactly where you could go based on how far you wanted to walk - today? No need to put on your mad scientist lab coat for that: you can visualize, plan and share your Travel Time Map to your blog or with friends using the Scribble Maps Pro Isochrone Tool. Let's go over what an isochrone is, and how we can use them today to discover new things in our neighbourhoods and beyond. What is an Isochrone?  An isochrone is a line on a diagram or map connecting points relating to the same time or equal times. Objects on a map that are connected within an isochrone line happen at the same time. These lines show a 10 minute walking distance from the central blue marker. The image above shows a series of blue lines coming from a centra blue m...

Your map data is important and that is why we are excited to roll out a new feature that lets you encrypt your map data with a military grade encryption. You can use this encryption with maps you save with us as well as maps you save offline. Technical We use the military standard AES-256 with a PBKDF2 key. When executing encryption we do it all on your machine. The password you use to encrypt your map data never comes to our servers. When encrypted data is saved to our servers we have no way to access the map data. When retrieving the map data the encrypted data is returned to your machine and decrypted on your machine. You will need to enter your encryption password every time you want to access the data. Double Authentication In order to access the encrypted map data you will either need to know the map password or have an account with viewing rights for the map. Once the encrypted map data is loaded, the second authentication is providing the encryption password. ...

We have a rolled out a large feature for our VIP users and think it is worth writing a post about! Introducing Base Layers Module Looking in the bottom window you can see we have added a new panel (you can collapse/expand it with the arrow). This new area allows you to not only crop the map but also add both TMS and WMS layer types. We are planning to add more as well! Map Cropping Map cropping allows you to take any polygon or multiple polygons and crop out the rest of the map. In the above image we have made a map crop of the state of Nebraska. In this example we have the crop out color set to  black with a slight transparency but you can set the color to anything you want and also make the cropped out areas not visible at all. To get this effect with the state we used the "Region Highlight" tool to create a polygon for Nebraska and then applied the crop using it. How to add a map crop There is two ways to add a crop. The first is to click the + butto...

There is a lot of value saving to the cloud. When you save to scribble maps you cannot only access your map from anywhere but we also keep a save history so changes can be recovered. We are one of the only mapping services that offer save history logs of maps. That said, there are times when you don't want your data to touch the web. Though Scribble Maps has been through security audits there are times you may want to be overly cautious with your geo data. This is why we rolled out the ability to save and load offline map files. How Does it Work? When you hit "Offline Save" a .smjson file will be downloaded to your system. SMJSON is just a text file that contains all your geodata. Clicking "Offline Load" will allow you to load this downloaded file back into Scribble Maps. While the file will download it should be noted that this leverages HTML5 tech so you are not actually downloading the file from us you are downloading it from your browser. At no po...

We rolled out a large update today and the biggest feature is the addition of the pen tool for drawing smooth curves on a map.  We have created the UX in such a way that it can be easily done without much technical experience. This post will focus on how to use the tool. Drawing To draw a curve all you have to do is select the pen tool an then start clicking or touching the map. When you click you will see something like this. Point nodes are the points that the line segments curve between. The control nodes controls how much of a curve there is. The easiest way to understand how these work is to just place some points and move them around to get a feel for it. Locking Points If you want to work on the line without accidentally adding additional points to the end of the line, you can click the "Lock Point Add" in the top left corner. Finishing Once you are done you can click "complete curve" in the top left in the same panel as the lock ...

We have rolled out our first version of our GIS and advanced operations panel. This panel lets you do some really cool things like bulk editing, creating travel time polygons, grids, and more. You can even create your own scripts for later usage. To access this panel click "Scripts & GIS" under menu. GIS Operations Overview This screen allows you to do sophisticate operations such as creating exact circles, measuring distances along lines, changing marker styles in bulk and more!    To get started simply navigate the folders on the left to find the operation you are looking for.  Create Line By Points:    Draw a line between two latitude / longitude points. Input Title (optional) Input Start Lat,Lng Input End Lat,Lng Select a color for the line. Click Create Line.  Create Circle at Point:    Draw a Circle around point with radius. Input Title (optional) Input middle Lat,Lng Input Radius Click Create Circle   I...