Suggestion: Map Tile Status & Auto Download

[alizhan]

I recently used the live tracking feature of TF for some navigating on old mining roads. While it worked (now that 2.1 finally supports my POS Magellan GPS), I ran into a problem. I had tried the pan-around-to-cache-all-the-tiles approach to seeding my cache, but I apparently missed some crucial tiles. Zooming in or out didn't help, since I hadn't cached those tiles at all.

My suggestion has two parts: First, it would be nice if one could see easily what tiles are cached. Possibly overlaying the target grid onto a larger grid's images, so one has some context about what tiles are missing (e.g., show the 4M tiles, with shading showing the status of the 1M tiles).

Second, it would be *really* nice if TF allowed batch downloading of multiple resolutions and styles for a given area. That is, given this area, download all 1M, 4M, 16M, and 64M topos and aerials. Obviously, this could be abused pretty badly, but perhaps limits could be built in?

  -- Mark

[Krein]

I like your idea about shading large scale tiles to indicate whether the tiles "below" them have been downloaded.  We'll think about that.

You can do batch downloads of tiles using the 'load maps tool' (on the toolbar).  Just draw a box, go to sleep, and you'll have your tiles.  Turn off whatever tilesets you don't want in Preferences->Tilesets.

[alizhan]

Quote (Krein @ Aug. 30 2004,8:57)

You can do batch downloads of tiles using the 'load maps tool' (on the toolbar).  Just draw a box, go to sleep, and you'll have your tiles.  Turn off whatever tilesets you don't want in Preferences->Tilesets.

Ah, yes. Just like it describes in the status bar when I select it.

Sigh.

I always poke around the main and context menus for options; I rarely think to look at the status bar for instructions. I should, but I don't.

  -- Mark