Streetmap for Mobiles

I have been disappointed with the capabilities of my Nokia 7250i’s XHTML browser. Although it can theoretically load almost any web page in practice virtually all web pages are too big for its miniscule memory and result in an error.

One site that I wish I had remote access to is streetmap (specifically the London street search). But even trying to load one GIF (no HTML) from the resultant map gives the error, “Not enough memory”.

Rather than be defeated, however, I have written a Java servlet that does searches on streetmap, screen scrapes the central GIF (the one with the road you searched for on), resizes it (actually I make it slightly bigger) and reencodes it as a JPEG. For some reason the phone seems better able to cope with JPEGs than GIFs at the size we are talking about (15-20KB). You can access the service via a browser (phone or computer based but not WAP) at http://bluebones.net:8080/map/. (Sadly I am having to run Tomcat on port 8080 at the moment so this won’t work behind some firewalls – if anyone knows how I can run IIS and Tomcat on port 80 simultaneously please drop me a line (address below).) You need to Zoom the image once you receive for street names to be legible.

I really need to drop the colour depth on the image when resizing to reduce its weight (streetmap images come at 256 colours but look fine at 16) and thus the cost of using this (plus increase the loading speed). I also need to add in links for North, South, East and West because the map is much less useful if your road happens to be near the edge (with the streetmap website you get the eight surrounding squares as well as the one with your road in it). Of course by the time you read this I might have made these changes.

If you use this service and have any comments/requests please send them to bakert+streetmap@gmail.com.