I re-visited user-friendly mapping tool UMapper this week, after an email from them announcing the official launch of their whizz-bang weather maps.
Creating a UMapper live weather map really is a piece of cake. Just log into UMapper, choose the weather template, zoom in on the area you want to display, save, and copy the resulting code to your blog. Done.
Clickable temperature markers show the five-day forecast and US maps have live radar feed too.
Besides weather mapping, UMapper has a few other gizmos that really impress me (especially from an education perspective), such as the ability to upload custom maps and create ‘geo-games’.
But just before we move on to those, here’s a weather map for the Midlands (remember, the radar slider won’t work in UK). If you’d like to see how to make one in about 30 seconds, watch this short UMapper video.
Now … in the marvellous Midlands lies Loughborough (where I went to school many moons ago). It has four twin towns: Schwabisch Hall in Germany; Gembloux in Belgium, Zamosc in Poland and Epinal in France. Terrific places.
Imagine we’re doing a school project on twin towns. Here’s the simple map we might create using UMapper to show their locations. Updating in UMapper will automatically update maps embedded on your website. (To view in full screen mode, click the square button, top right. Press esc to return):
Ease of use is UMapper’s great strength and there’s a great choice of placemarkers (more than Google) or you can upload your own. Pictures can be added by linking to the URL, uploading, or – as above – picking one from Photobucket, (integrated with the UMapper map editor). Unless I’m missing something, though, you can include text OR a picture in the marker bubble; not both.
All this can be done easily with Google Maps, of course. But here’s where it gets interesting.
Let’s see if our class has been paying attention with a map quiz. Try it for yourself. First look carefully at the map above. Now go to the ‘geo-darts’ game below and see how close you get to placing the twin towns in the right location. I really recommend you play this in full-screen mode.
Fun, ay? This UMapper video shows you just how easy it is to create.
One of the things I really like about UMapper is custom maps. Our class could upload an old map of Loughborough, then annotate it to show how the town has grown, or where the main factories were and what they made; we could even upload a picture of a Great Central steam locomotive and annotate it to show how it works. Here’s the UMapper video on custom maps.
And finally … sound. An exercise I set with journalists learning online skills is to capture the story of a city in sound, then plot the sounds on a map. Google Maps and MP3 are not good friends. But UMapper makes adding audio easy.
Simply upload your MP3 (or link to a URL), drag the placemarker icon into position, and click on the neat audio player. The only shame is that you can’t include text and a picture to accompany the audio. Again, here’s the video.
In the example below, I’ve used only the sound of Loughborough’s famous carillon and Great Central preserved steam railway. But you get the idea.
With a free UMapper account you have a limited number of custom maps and you can’t include you own branding (or advertising) on maps. But for most learning and blogging uses, free is fine. Here’s what you get if you upgrade to a premium account. There’s still room for improvement, but I think UMapper is doing some great work.
What else could you do with UMapper?
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