Chrome OS Maps

August 19, 2011

There's now a way for people who use the Chrome browser to see Ordnance Survey maps of Great Britain on Geocaching.com

I've written a Greasemonkey script that adds an OS map type option on the Geocaching Maps Beta page. It also works on geocache pages when you use dynamic maps. The script displays OS Landranger (1:50000) and Explorer (1:25000) imagery from Bing.

I've written the script to work with both Chrome and Firefox.

For Chrome, you don't need to install Greasemonkey - just install the script from userscripts.org (link below). Chrome and Chromium have been able to run userscripts directly since v4, but I've only tested with v13. For Firefox, you need to install the Greasemonkey extension ("How do I use this?" link on userscripts.org). I've tested with FF5 and 6 on Windows and FF3.6 on Linux. Firefox 5 broke Greasemonkey, but this has been fixed in Greasemonkey v0.9.8.

To find out more or install the script, visit the Geocaching Map Enhancements page on userscripts.org

August 19, 2011

I installed these on Chrome by mistake last week and was mightly surprised to find the OS map feature. It's brilliant!

Thanks very much!!

August 20, 2011

This is really cool, thankyou!

August 21, 2011

You sir are a champion amongst men. I raise my hand and salute you. Thanks!

August 21, 2011

fantastic thank you very much!

1.4k · August 23, 2011

Thank you very much. This is great, can now see easily where the local trails are and which caches are near them, and where there are long gaps along the trails. There are so many footpaths to explore, and so little time!

A word of caution though, comparing these with Magic maps, I can see the minor tracks/footpaths do not quite match up with the Magic maps ones (not the national trails, the smaller farm tracks and such) and the restricted areas such as SSSI, rural parks and so on are not on the OS map. It will be a lot easier to quickly see where existing caches are on magic maps without having to input each set of coords, thanks! :-)

August 25, 2011

I am finding this additional feature very useful indeed. Thank you for taking the time to write it.

August 26, 2011

I've just downloaded this to Firefox and it's wonderful. The refresh option is overshadowed by the OS map feature but is no small achievement by itself. Thank you very much - I'll never need to download cache data to Quo again. Hoorah!

August 28, 2011

Thanks very much.That really is agreat tool.

August 30, 2011

Thanks for all the positive feedback.

I've tweaked the script again. v0.4 now lets you search the Beta Map by Ordnance Survey National Grid references.

If that sounds helpful, you can get the update at http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/109145

Edited August 30, 2011 by jri

August 31, 2011

This is great, it even prints with the cache locations. No more trips to the library to get maps ( I'm a bit old school and have to have a map with me)

August 31, 2011

Just occasionally , a wee gem appears on the UK forums .... this is by far the best for a long long time .

Thanks so much ....

A smiley Crome user

August 31, 2011

Just occasionally , a wee gem appears on the UK forums .... this is by far the best for a long long time .

Thanks so much ....

A smiley Crome user

Hey, pretty darn smart!! :laughing:

Even I managed to get it working!! :rolleyes:

1.4k · September 3, 2011

This is great, it even prints with the cache locations. No more trips to the library to get maps ( I'm a bit old school and have to have a map with me)

:unsure:

How do you print from the Beta Map? :unsure:

September 4, 2011

This is great, it even prints with the cache locations. No more trips to the library to get maps ( I'm a bit old school and have to have a map with me)

How do you print from the Beta Map?

Pressing Ctrl-P normally works.

In Firefox, you might have to check the Page Setup menu first, to make sure that your browser is set to print background images.

1.4k · September 4, 2011

This is great, it even prints with the cache locations. No more trips to the library to get maps ( I'm a bit old school and have to have a map with me)

How do you print from the Beta Map?

Pressing Ctrl-P normally works.

In Firefox, you might have to check the Page Setup menu first, to make sure that your browser is set to print background images.

Thanks!

September 4, 2011

Thanks very much for posting this. It's an excellent addition

September 4, 2011

Just GREAT! Thanks :-)

2.6k · September 5, 2011

Brilliant, thanks!

I like seeing the cache locations on the OS map, so up to now I've been pasting the coordinates into http://benchmarks.org.uk/, and manually marking up the map. This will save lots of time.

September 10, 2011

Can I add my thanks, works a treat with Chrome. Very clever and thanks for your hard work and sharing.

2.5k · September 10, 2011

Also works on the far superior and safer Dragon browser ;-)

Dragon is Chrome based, but has better security, especially when you use the Secure DNS servers

October 12, 2011

This is a great addition, thank you. How do I get Explorer maps up though as it appears to be landranger only. I use Firefox.

Thanks

October 12, 2011

This is a great addition, thank you. How do I get Explorer maps up though as it appears to be landranger only. I use Firefox.

Thanks

It looks like Bing (where the script gets the maps from) has changed to only supply Landranger imagery. I'll have a look to see whether there are some tweaks I can do to get the Explorer maps back.

October 12, 2011

I downloaded this script (LOVE Greasemonkey!!) a while ago and it is FAB.

Thank you so much for writing it, I use it all the time.

Jess

2.6k · October 12, 2011

This is a great addition, thank you. How do I get Explorer maps up though as it appears to be landranger only. I use Firefox.

Thanks

It looks like Bing (where the script gets the maps from) has changed to only supply Landranger imagery. I'll have a look to see whether there are some tweaks I can do to get the Explorer maps back.

Ah. I noticed the other day that I could't zoom down to Explorer level; I assumed it was some temporary glitch. Would be great if you can get them back; I've become quite attached to this feature.

October 12, 2011

Brilliant - thank you so much for sharing this with us!!

October 13, 2011

This is a great addition, thank you. How do I get Explorer maps up though as it appears to be landranger only. I use Firefox.

Thanks

It looks like Bing (where the script gets the maps from) has changed to only supply Landranger imagery. I'll have a look to see whether there are some tweaks I can do to get the Explorer maps back.

Ah. I noticed the other day that I could't zoom down to Explorer level; I assumed it was some temporary glitch. Would be great if you can get them back; I've become quite attached to this feature.

I've had a poke about, and unfortunately this looks non-trivial to fix. The problem is that most of the map sources I've found align OS map tiles to Grid North, while Google Map tiles align to True North. This doesn't normally matter too much if you're only interested in one point, but the further you go from that point, the greater the divergence. This means that if you want to do a simple overlay of Geocache locations (google-style map tiles) onto OS map tiles, they'll be OK at the centre of the screen, but increasingly mis-aligned towards the edges.

I do have a cunning plan, but it might take a while to put into practice.

October 13, 2011

Either way, I'm grateful for your efforts.

October 14, 2011

I've been pointed to this only this evening; as a devoted lover of OS Maps for 50 years, and a geocacher for one of those, this is like discovering the Missing Link.

Unbelievably efficient

Thank you doesn't do it Justice

3.9k · October 16, 2011

Problem at Bing's end see:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/fi-FI/vemapcontroldev/thread/8c9f7506-bfaa-4b98-8e98-eee9f7064db0

October 16, 2011

Problem at Bing's end see:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/fi-FI/vemapcontroldev/thread/8c9f7506-bfaa-4b98-8e98-eee9f7064db0

Thanks for posting that - v helpful to know.

October 17, 2011

Let's hope it gets sorted as it would be absolutely brilliant for this lo-techy to have a nice explorer map to print off before I set out.

October 19, 2011

Problem at Bing's end see:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/fi-FI/vemapcontroldev/thread/8c9f7506-bfaa-4b98-8e98-eee9f7064db0

My heart sunk when I realised that the Bing maps were now 50k! I really thought it was due to the OS withdrawing the rights to display them (or something like that). I hope it's just due to a technical fault at the Bing maps end.

jri: Thank you for your script!

October 19, 2011

An excellent tool thank very much for your hard work.

October 20, 2011

News from Bing on the MSDN forums...

A data update we received was missing the higher detail data. It will be re-published as soon as a new copy is received and processed.

Well, I don't know how long we will have to wait, but it looks hopeful that it will get fixed without me having to do any alterations to the script

December 6, 2011

News from Bing on the MSDN forums...

A data update we received was missing the higher detail data. It will be re-published as soon as a new copy is received and processed.

Well, I don't know how long we will have to wait, but it looks hopeful that it will get fixed without me having to do any alterations to the script

Further updates from MSDN...

This will likely be corrected in the next imagery update. Our team is well aware of this issue and are monitoring it.

Imagery updates occur in Bing Maps ever 3-4 months. The last one was around the end of September/ begining of October.

So it looks like the larger-scale maps could be back sometime in January / February...

December 6, 2011

This is great.Thank you.

January 2, 2012

Just been pointed in the direction of this by I!. Fantastic and a huge thanks for writing this.

January 9, 2012

News from Bing on the MSDN forums...

A data update we received was missing the higher detail data. It will be re-published as soon as a new copy is received and processed.

Well, I don't know how long we will have to wait, but it looks hopeful that it will get fixed without me having to do any alterations to the script

It looks like the 1:25K maps are back! They are for me tonight via Firefox at maximum zoom. Wonderful!!

- John.

January 9, 2012

News from Bing on the MSDN forums...

A data update we received was missing the higher detail data. It will be re-published as soon as a new copy is received and processed.

Well, I don't know how long we will have to wait, but it looks hopeful that it will get fixed without me having to do any alterations to the script

It looks like the 1:25K maps are back! They are for me tonight via Firefox at maximum zoom. Wonderful!!

- John.

Yay!

January 9, 2012

this makes me happy - thank you

2.6k · January 10, 2012

Hooray! I have been missing these. Great to have them back.

January 10, 2012

Yay - chrome too!! Thanks for the fix!!

January 10, 2012

I've just installed this and it's GREAT! Thank you.

January 11, 2012

Thank you so much for this fantastic add-on!

January 12, 2012

Some scripts work in Opera browser too.

Save scripts to a folder and point Opera at that folder. Refresh the page.

2.6k · February 14, 2012

With today's site update, the OS map option from Chrome is gone.

February 14, 2012

With today's site update, the OS map option from Chrome is gone.

Not happy .. the uses of the OS map was grate ... WHY , did they have to change it ..

and will a new script be written soon to over come our loss

February 14, 2012

With today's site update, the OS map option from Chrome is gone.

Not quite! OS Maps still seem to work on the cache pages - but sadly not on Beta Maps.

Partly, it must be said, because "Beta Maps" has become just plain "Maps", and partly because we're into the brave new world of using the Leaflet API rather than Google Maps. This is presumably because Google are going to start charging high-volume websites for using their API.

and will a new script be written soon to over come our loss

I've already figured out a way of making OS maps work with the basic Leaflet API. Unfortunately it may take me a few weeks to figure out how to integrate this with the new Geocaching Maps website. I'll see what I can do...

February 15, 2012

and will a new script be written soon to over come our loss

I've already figured out a way of making OS maps work with the basic Leaflet API. Unfortunately it may take me a few weeks to figure out how to integrate this with the new Geocaching Maps website. I'll see what I can do...

You are a diamond geezer

Chrome OS Maps

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