Faster Geocoding

Thanks to SR of http://www.cheapps.org for a performance tip: Turn off visbility on the bottom textarea field before Geocoding begins to speed things up.

Before Firefox 2.0 I didn’t find a big performance difference with updating the TextArea field in real-time and displaying it. Looked “cool” to me so I kept it. But when Firefox 2 came out they added a spell check feature to all textarea fields and the spellcheck process seems to slowdown writes to the textarea field when a lot of data is used.

Anyway, thanks for the tip!

New Feature: Different Colored Markers / Grouping

As of last night I’ve added the ability for map markers to be colored based on a “Group” field. You can create up to 6 different values for the Group field and each will display in a different color. A legend will be added below the map that shows the description of each group and the color of the markers in that group.

The colors are: orange, blue, green, purple, red, and yellow.

You can enable this feature by selecting a “Group By” column when creating your map. If you do not wish to group by a certain field, do not include a “Group” column in your source data and/or select “Don’t Group” in the Map Fields section.

For awhile now people have been asking for a way to change marker color. I think this is the most straightforward way to allow maps with different categories of markers. Here is an example map showing multiple groupings:

Apple Stores Grouping Example

Let me know if you have any feedback for this feature by posting comments below. Thanks!

New Feature: Lettered Labels for Markers

Lots of people have requested this one, sorry for taking so long to implement it. Now maps containing 26 addresses or less will be labeled with alphabet characters on the map, and in the text below on the saved map page.

This way you can print out the map and take it with you! Here’s an example using our favorite map of Apple Stores in New York.

Feel free to post any constructive comments you have about this feature on the blog.