A carnival of technology

You may be familiar with the Google maps overlay that David Cantrell created a while back using the MARTA rail lines. Since David doesn’t live in Georgia anymore, I took over the role of MARTA fanatic and copied his data for my own purposes. The only improvements I’ve made so far are using the different types of circle-P icons for the different varieties of parking at the stations, adding icons for the park and ride lots and adding a handful of points of interest for CCT. I also bent the track lines a little for a few sections north of Lindbergh, but I stopped that while I come to terms with the fact that the line data files are going to be really freaking huge. I also switched the data files to XML, since I hear that makes everything more fun.

Of perhaps more interest than the map itself, though, are a couple little tools I made to simplify data input. The first is a tool for finding points. Anywhere you click on the map will add a marker, and clicking on the marker will give you the coordinates. The second is a tool for making lines. Every point you click will be added to a GPolyline object, and the coordinates will be displayed in the textbox at the bottom of the page. Comes with an undo button, because I have poor mouse control. I’ve found these two pages to be quite useful, so I thought that I would share.