2008 has been a very exciting year in many respects. Ever since the launch of UMapper, things have been progressing quickly, and in many ways, UMapper’s growth has exceeded our expectations. We are especially happy to see the growth of our user community and steady flow of improvements to UMapper’s platform. Along with many other companies, we were impacted by the economic downturn and are still adjusting to the new environment. However, UMapper is growing strongly and we are looking forward to some very promising opportunities in 2009.
Over the past nine months the UMapper service has been growing steadily. The chart below shows the impressive month-to-month growth in number of maps served. As you can see, we served almost 300K maps this month, not a bad way to end the year!
In addition to “maps served”, we also track “map views”. A map view is defined as any change generated by an end user in the viewable area of a map. A zoom is a map view, a pan is also a map view, etc. In this area we also did well with nearly a million map views in December!
Overall, our numbers are up across the board. All of this success is only possible because of our faithful user community. Thank you for your continuing support! Please let us know what improvements or changes you’d like to see in UMapper in 2009.
We are excited to have squeezed in another UMapper release before the end of the year. Here is the list of new features and improvements:
Time Control for Markers
This feature is the first of a two part release which will allow users to control a point’s time stamp and appearance on a time-line. Now you can associate a marker with a specific time. To see the feature in action, add a marker and select Marker Date/Time option (little clock icon), then specify the time in the dialog box.
Keyboard Shortcuts
In order to streamline the map authoring process we’ve added the following keyboard shortcuts:
Save: Ctrl+S or Shift+S
Export ActionScript: Ctrl+E or Shift+E
Select Tool: V
Preview/Pointer: A
Zoom: Z (With zoom tool selected, use Shift to zoom out on mouse click)
Space: Hand
Marker: M
Line: L
Polygon: P
Circle: C
Rectangle: R
KML Import
The KML import engine got significantly smarter and more tolerable of malformed KML files. We can now import fancy maps like this one.
That’s it, let us know if you see anything funky. Happy new year!
It has been a week since we started Twittering and we love it! If you’d like to get more UMapper insider info as well as some other random stuff we post, you should definitely follow us on Twitter.
The holiday season is in the full swing but you guys can’t stop creating new maps! It is getting harder to choose the map of the week as the number of new maps is steadily growing.
