1 Reply by charlesroper

  • charlesroper
  • charlesroper
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Re: Grab a Grid Reference

Someone passed me the following link to this superb grid reference tool. It is probably the best user experience I have come across for this sort of thing. I love how, as you drag the pin around, the squares get rendered on-the-fly. I also love the implementation of the references at different scales in the box in the top-right, and how their colours represent the colours of the squares on the map.

http://tr.im/iXv3

I was also delighted to see this tool is by Keith Balmer, who you may know from this forum. It seems that something in this style might be ideally suited to something like Indicia.

Charles

Charles Roper
Digital Development Manager | Field Studies Council
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2 Reply by kitenet

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Re: Grab a Grid Reference

Thanks for the link Charles, looks very useful (and thanks to Keith for developing it!).

Martin

Martin Harvey
Biological Records Centre
CEH Wallingford

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3 Reply by johnvanbreda

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Re: Grab a Grid Reference

Thanks again Charles. I'll have a check and see if Keith is happy for us to plagiarise his ideas, since this UI does indeed work well.

Cheers

John van Breda
Biodiverse IT

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4 Reply by johnvanbreda

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Re: Grab a Grid Reference

An update - Keith has kindly confirmed his code is Open Source so I'll add a feature ticket and pick this up when I get a chance (unless anyone else fancies to chip in?)

Best Wishes

John van Breda
Biodiverse IT

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5 Reply by Graham French

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Re: Grab a Grid Reference

Thanks Keith for developing this and making his code open source, it does look very useful and would be a great feature in the online recording kit John is producing. For me, if its possible,  a useful further addition would be to extend it to include tetrad squares :)

Best wishes
Graham

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6 Reply by johnvanbreda

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Re: Grab a Grid Reference

Hi Graham,

We cover tetrads in Indicia so when it gets migrated across it should pick up that capability.

Best Wishes

John van Breda
Biodiverse IT

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7 Reply by Keith Balmer

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Re: Grab a Grid Reference

I have bowed to pressure and added in support for tetrads and 10km squares.

Its getting a bit slow now with all the extra redrawing. If anyone can suggest any speedups please let me know.

Regards, Keith

8 Reply by johnvanbreda

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Re: Grab a Grid Reference

Hi Keith,
Nice work. It seems to run quite well on my PC. Are you using Firefox or IE? I have noticed before that Firefox 3 seems to run JavaScript much faster than IE (and Firefox 2) so maybe that is why.

I'll have a good look at the code at some point regarding performance, but one idea might be to omit the 10m grid reference unless you have zoomed in a lot closer, and also to omit the 10km reference when you are zoomed in.

For Indicia I plan to wrap this as a jQuery extension that can be dropped into a data entry form, then also port it to OpenLayers as an alternative with support for alternative grids (Irish etc).

Thanks again Keith,

John van Breda
Biodiverse IT

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9 Reply by charlesroper

  • charlesroper
  • charlesroper
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Re: Grab a Grid Reference

It runs really well in both Google Chrome and Firefox 3.1 (beta), both of which have cutting-edge Javascript engines (V8 and Tracemonkey respectively). Safari does pretty well too, but it doesn't seem quite as good as Chrome or FF. IE is, for me, the slowest, even under IE8 which is supposed to have improved on the IE7 engine considerably.

Charles Roper
Digital Development Manager | Field Studies Council
http://www.field-studies-council.org | https://twitter.com/charlesroper | https://twitter.com/fsc_digital

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10 Reply by iain

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Re: Grab a Grid Reference

Hi Keith

I've rattled together a page at http://www.e-dat.info/OSMapPage.aspx which kind of does the same as yours - but much more crudely. I'd like to develop this further - are you able to offer advice?

Cheers

Iain

11 Reply by charliebarnes

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Re: Grab a Grid Reference

My two cents...

http://cucaera.co.uk/grid-ref-plotter/

The codes a bit buggy at the moment though...

Charlie Barnes
Information Officer
Greater Lincolnshire Nature Partnership

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