Geocaching Australia

Chwiliwr wrote:Just letting you know the links for Japan and North America under Community/OpenCaching are not valid. Japan doesn't seem to exist and the other returns a forbidden message.

The US one depends on your ISP. I can get to it from home, but not from work.
Opencaching Japan is not yet up and running, but is a valid OpenCaching node.

Is it just me or has the font changed on the GCA home page? Looks a lot clearer/sharper.

Or did I get new glasses???

A little from column A and a little from column B.

Yurt wrote:Is it just me or has the font changed on the GCA home page? Looks a lot clearer/sharper.

Or did I get new glasses???

If you followed us on Google+ you'd know (we do have a Facebook page that only gets updated semi annually, and doesn't really get site announcements placed on it ).

We've been playing with some simple cosmetic changes to refresh things just a little bit.

These new fonts seem to look better on Mobile devices in my opinion.

CraigRat wrote:(we do have a Facebook page that gets updated semi annually

He he he

Hi GCA admins, this is related to the picture I can generate: http://geocaching.com.au/cacher/danozz/ ... .png?r=vic
Are you able to zoom in a bit closer to Victoria? Or do you like it to be so far zoomed out.

danozz wrote:Hi GCA admins, this is related to the picture I can generate: http://geocaching.com.au/cacher/danozz/ ... .png?r=vic
Are you able to zoom in a bit closer to Victoria? Or do you like it to be so far zoomed out.

That's the best we can do with the original quality of file.
If we zoom in more it gets all pixelly.

CraigRat wrote:

Yurt wrote:Is it just me or has the font changed on the GCA home page? Looks a lot clearer/sharper.

Or did I get new glasses???

If you followed us on Google+ you'd know (we do have a Facebook page that only gets updated semi annually, and doesn't really get site announcements placed on it ).

We've been playing with some simple cosmetic changes to refresh things just a little bit.

These new fonts seem to look better on Mobile devices in my opinion.

I think they look better all round.

caughtatwork wrote:

danozz wrote:Hi GCA admins, this is related to the picture I can generate: http://geocaching.com.au/cacher/danozz/ ... .png?r=vic
Are you able to zoom in a bit closer to Victoria? Or do you like it to be so far zoomed out.

That's the best we can do with the original quality of file.
If we zoom in more it gets all pixelly.

It's obviously not hugely important, but it would be great if we could get better zoom on the geographically smaller states

If someone can find us good images to use that have no copyright issues then we can implement it.

If you do find something, let us know and let us know where they came from so we can check we can legally use them on the site.

Thanks!

The problem is not the quality, it's the size.
This is the base map we use.
http://geocaching.com.au/resources/map_australia.jpg
It's about 850KB when compressed.
In order to drawn the dots it gets uncompressed.
Uncompressed it's about 40MB.
Manipulating a file bigger than that causes memory problems.
So it's a balance between having a base map that can be manipulated without memory issues or a map that when zoomed in gets pixelated.

What about using a separate file for each state?

If you look at the file you will notice it is very much taller than wider. What's all that ice needed for. Actually it's needed because of the way the program works. It knows the bounds of the map in lat lon. So it plots the points on the map as an offset from a known set of Cartesian coordinates. If I make a map for each state I need to know the exact points of each map and use them when offsetting the lat lon points. So in reality it's a time thing. I don't have the time (or inclination) to make 10 maps (11 if you include AU or 12 if you want NZ) all around 1MB in size, setting up the co-ords and handling them in the plotter. If someone would like to make the images I can change the code.

Here ya go

On a more serious note, is the data that you use to create the pretty dots of green, yellow and white publically available? As a big list of cache types+coordinates with minimal formatting? Or possibly a big GPX? That way I could write my own script to lay the pretty dots out on one layer, and then just stick a map of dubious © status underneath.