Thunderforest Blog

Updates for our Vector Maps API

2017-12-29T00:00:00+01:00

It’s been a busy year here at Thunderforest HQ. We rolled out our API Keys to all of our existing customers, which was a timeconsuming-but-necessary task. We’ve also finished a range of software upgrades and infrastructure work, and running a growing and profitable small business doesn’t leave much spare time each week. So while it might have seemed quiet from our blog, there’s been a lot of work going on!

Towards the end of 2017 my focus has returned to technical work on our vector tiles. I initially created these in order to power our own in-house styles, as well as making it easier to create custom map styles for our customers. They’ve proven their worth over the last few years for our internal needs, but our vector tiles are increasing being used by our customers over-the-air, with the final rendering happening on client devices. One example is the Bike Hub Cycle Journey planner iOS app, which renders our vector tiles with a custom style, in addition to our regular map tiles.

With this in mind, I’ve been redesigning some aspects of our vector tilesets to make life easier for on-device rendering. As an example, in our first generation tilesets we have a separate layers for oceans at low zoom levels. Since this is just an artefact of how the maps were generated years ago, it makes sense now to revisit and combine the two ocean layers into one. Similarly, we’ve revisited how our contour lines are generated, and combined them with the layer used for elevation colouring. And there’s a whole list of additional points of interest, landuse types, boundaries and road and path attributes that I’m adding, based both on requests from our customers, and also features that I want to add to our own in-house maps. On reflection, I’ve been overly ambitious with my wishlist for the next release, and I could have broken down the project into a couple of smaller releases. But we’re getting very close now and it’ll all be worth it!

In the meantime, our first-generation vector tilesets are available for immediate use - served from the same high-performance infrastructure as all of our other maps. Sign up for your Thunderforest account today to get started.

Our New Static Maps API

2016-12-14T00:00:00+01:00

At long last, we’re happy to announce that our Static Maps API is now available for all our customers!

The Static Maps API allows you to choose the exact position and dimensions of a single map image. It’s a great solution when you aren’t looking for an interactive tiles-based map, and avoids the need to join and crop individual map images by hand to make a single image.

We developed the API over a year ago for one of our customers, who asked if we could put it together for their interactive gaming project. We’ve since had further enquiries, and we’ve been using it internally for a range of projects too. But it’s taken a surprisingly long time for me to put the documentation together, since we’ve been working on other projects too!

So if you’re looking for a simple way to get fixed map images from our services, then our Static Maps API is the answer. It’s available for immediate use, and works with all of our standard maps and our custom cartography too.

If you haven’t already done so, sign up for a Thunderforest account and get started!

API Keys are Now Available

2016-08-31T00:00:00+02:00

We’ve been trialing our new API Keys with our services for the last few months, and they are now available for all of our customers.

Simply sign in to your Thunderforest account, and you’ll see your API Keys on your dashboard. Add them to your Thunderforest URLs in your app or website configuration, and you’re all set. Our API Key documentation has the full details.

Background

So why are we introducing API Keys, and why now? For years we’ve tracked requests by using the HTTP Referer and User-Agent headers, along with other information such as IP addresses. This has worked well, but more recently we’ve found situations where this doesn’t work as well as we’d like. Some toolkits make it hard to set unique User-Agents headers. New privacy policies can make the Referers less reliable. For some of our newer server-to-server APIs, those headers are often missing by default, and we want to avoid jumping through hoops to get started. Some customers want to use our services on hundreds of their websites, and that becomes unweildy - they would otherwise need to contact us every time they add a new site. API Keys are therefore a useful way for customers to identify their traffic to us, and helps cut down the paperwork for everyone.

The Future

As our business has been growing rapidly, and the manual tracking has become more cumbersome, we will be enforcing API Keys in early 2017. So it’s worth updating your apps and website configurations to use API Keys in your next release.

We’re also further developing our request tracking system to integrate it into our website. This will bring you real-time information on your quota usage, and other useful information on your requests. In addition to our map tiles service, your API Keys will get you access to our other new and upcoming services.

Getting Started

If you’re already using API Keys in your apps or on your website, then there’s nothing you need to do!

If you’ve been using Thunderforest maps and haven’t got an account with us yet, please sign up to get your API Keys today.

If you have any questions about API Keys our support team is ready to help.

New map style - Neighbourhood

2016-06-29T00:00:00+02:00

The eagle-eyed among you (and there are several!) will have noticed that we added two new map styles to our list a couple of months ago - Neighbourhood and Mobile Atlas. More on the latter in a future post.

Neighbourhood is another great map design from Richard Fairhurst, demonstrating the flexibility of the Thunderforest vector tiles. This is a general-purpose map that can be used for a wide variety of situations. Neighbourhood can be used as a background layer for your own points of interest and other overlays, or as a location map for place finding. It’s great for looking at local areas since we’ve condensed street names to display as many as possible, and we have clear labels standing out from an uncluttered background.

And yes, we’ve gone for the British spelling of Neighbourhood - so watch your spelling! If you’d like to use this map layer on your website or in your application, sign up for an account and get started today.

New map style - Pioneer

2015-12-02T00:00:00+01:00

“Pioneer” is the second in a series of new map styles now available on Thunderforest (the first, Spinal Map, is described here). This style, designed by Richard Fairhurst, harks back to the days of pioneering railroad construction in the American West, using Western fonts, verdigris buildings and a limited colour palette to evoke those late-19th and early-20th century maps.

Don’t worry, these maps are bang up-to-date. Yet never have the modern Shinkansen lines in Osaka looked so old!

Since these maps were of a time when railroads were king, they have the main emphasis and roads are only lightly shown. My favourite parts are the large-scale maps around stations where the buildings give a wonderful backdrop to the railroads - combined with Richard’s great choice of fonts.

As with Spinal Map, Pioneer is based on our Transport vector tileset, enabling fast and scalable maps across the globe.

New map style - Spinal Map

2015-11-13T00:00:00+01:00

A few months ago I commissioned cartography expert and OpenStreetMapper Extraordinaire Richard Fairhurst to create some new map styles for Thunderforest. My aim was to show off the possibilities of the new vector tiles that now power all my existing maps. Every cartographer has their own particular style, and so I wanted to see some maps that looked a bit different from what I normally come up with.

Richard certainly didn’t disappoint!

The first of his creations is now available for use - Spinal Map! Featuring metal umlauts and tongue-in-cheek cartography, it’s a striking new style for all your heavy-metal website needs. Which I’m sure are many! As they (almost) say in the film - this map goes up to 11. Make sure to check out all the town and city names that have been given their very-own Spinal Map substitutes - suggestions are welcome.

The best thing about this map is how it shows off the power of the Thunderforest vector tilesets, combined with a bit of imagination of course. Spinal Map is, believe it or not, based on the same vector tileset as my Transport and Transport Dark maps!

SSL now included in all plans

2015-10-23T00:00:00+02:00

SSL support (also known as “HTTPS” and “TLS” support) is now included in all our plans.

This change allows you to access map tiles over a secure connection, including custom styles. It’s most useful when you want to show maps on a page already served over HTTPS, where serving tiles over plain HTTP can trigger mixed content warnings from web browsers. It’s also useful in other circumstances, not least to provide a small amount of privacy to your customers. Using HTTPS requests prevents network monitoring of which map images your customers are viewing, for example when they are using public wifi hotspots.

Big thanks to everyone who gave feedback during the rollout of SSL tiles to OpenCycleMap and OpenStreetMap earlier this year. This large-scale real-world testing helped us to implement performance improvements and handle some rare edge cases. Thanks also to the Mozilla team for their SSL config generator, which we are using to generate up-to-date cipher suite lists.

Since the whole Internet is increasingly moving towards encryption by default, I’ve updated our documentation to use https:// urls as standard.

Switching over to our SSL enabled tiles is straightforward - change the urls from http:// to https:// in your code - nothing else is required! If you’re not yet using Thunderforest maps in your project, then you should sign up today.