Cartography in miniature

I remember such a funny case was. During my business trip to one of the foreign cities now, friends invited me and my companions to the pub. The business is good, timely (the first snow was already on the street), so we happily agreed. As they explained to us, the bar was on the main street, was quite famous and large, so we didn’t even go into details like the exact address or visible landmarks. We hoped that we would find it anyway. As a result, we walked past the designated place three times until we guessed to see the exact address, using, as you might guess, a search in Opera Mini.

You can regard it as an advertisement or something else, but Opera Mini browser turned out to be the most accessible and simple way to navigate in an unfamiliar city. And I can also say that, perhaps, very soon it will be even easier to do this with the help of a miniature mobile browser thanks to the new service under the unambiguous name deCarta . The developers of the eponymous California company have prepared a special version of their service for use in Opera Mini. Naturally, for now this is only a test and very raw version, but there is already something to watch live. Under the cut - a brief overview and a lot of screenshots.

So, as I said above, deCarta is a service that offers an interactive map of the whole world right on a mobile phone with Opera Mini browser installed. It’s very easy to use - just go to mini.decarta.com :

To begin, you will be asked to specify your location. Well, we indicate, for example, the city of St. Petersburg, we choose a country ...

... and - voila! We are exactly in the capital of Russia, the hero-city of Moscow.

And I warned that the service is still quite raw. However, this is not the last bug in the service, so we continue the study. Using magic triangles, which is not very convenient (whom I cheat - it's just awful), we gradually still get to the right place for us.

I could not resist and asked the developers of deCarta why they did not consider the possibility of scrolling the map with keys or manually (on devices with a touch screen). It turned out that this was not a strange love for triangles, but the limitations imposed by Opera Mini itself and the hardware capabilities of inexpensive handsets: for smooth scrolling and scaling of the map, you would have to load huge sheets of images into the phone’s memory. Excuse so-so, of course, and I think that soon developers will be able to solve this problem, the benefit is who to learn.

By the way - about scaling. In order to get to this function, you need to scroll up the page (in the real test on the phone the scale was already displayed at the bottom of the page) - then the scale toggle bar will open:

... as well as some very useful links. Especially - the second, Settings . As I understood, after a rather lengthy study of the service with an English-language interface, this is where you can switch to the Russian version. This explains why my screenshots are made with different localization. The red lines on the map are not traffic jams, but federal roads. We, who grew up on Yandex.Probk, are unlikely to get used to such an interpretation of color, and I don’t have to, I think: they promised to change it.
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In addition to useful links and scaling scales, there is one more quite useful element here - a drop-down list of categories. You can choose, for example, a cafe and get on the map exact indexes for the nearest establishments of this category:

If now again scroll the page with the map up, then we will have a list of all the institutions that were in focus, indicating the name of the phone (it is hidden behind the icon, and when pressed, you are invited to call this number) and the distance from you (more precisely, from points, which is the center of the map at the moment) to each place.

If you wish, you can see (most often - so far theoretically) and some kind of image associated with the institution, as well as get a little more detailed information about it.

Now let's go back a few screenshots back to the map of Peter. In the upper left area of ​​the screen there are a couple of curious icons - with a compass and an asterisk. Let's deal with them. The first is a search by address. In the sense of - address search. More precisely ... In general - see for yourself. We press "compass" and open a window with fields where you can specify some important data:

After the data known to us has dried up and we don’t know what to specify yet, press the “Search” button (in fact, it seemed logical to add another button like “I’m feeling lucky”, but this is a matter of taste). As a result, we get comprehensive results that fully satisfy our curiosity:

We will make a temporary discount on the fact that Russian has always been considered difficult for foreigners to learn and understand. The only strange thing is that the second one was chosen from the Nevsky Prospect tandem, so we can easily explore all the prospectuses in St. Petersburg thanks to this unique feature of this funny bug.

However, having chosen the suitable option from the offered list, we get to exactly where we wanted:

... which in itself is already strange, because the map does not indicate the house numbers. I suspect that the numbers are still there, but they are stored in the database on the server, and are not displayed temporarily on the card. Yes, and it is not necessary to find fault with the test version - the place was found, as required ... Well - well, it was not, but at least it became clear in the style of a request to stop the route taxi - "that's about here somewhere." Let's leave the developers to "finish" the search and try to poke into the icon with an asterisk. In fact, everything is simple: the place that was at the time of pressing the center of the map is marked with the appropriate icon, and we can add some information to it:

All our saved points will be placed in a certain archive, access to which is carried out on one of the convenient links, which I mentioned a little higher.

This concludes a brief overview and proceed to the conclusions. I understand everyone who is now preparing to leave sarcastic comments - yes, I agree, we have long been using much more convenient and informative, and for many, completely free in terms of the cost of traffic specialized Java-applications. But this service has certain advantages over its competitors, such as:

1. deCarta works throughout the world (and, by the way, the information content for many foreign cities is much higher );
2. The service does not require the installation of additional specialized applications on the phone;
3. The service will soon be built into Opera Mini by default;
4. Service is not a development of Empire G;
5. The flight speed of a bee is almost eight times higher than that of a bumblebee.

However, the fifth paragraph does not apply to the topic, just an interesting scientific fact. As an indicator that the first four points of the questions and objections do not cause.

As I said above, the project is very test and has not yet shown the full potential. Much more is planned, including the addition of geolocation support, a more intuitive interface and other improvements. By the way, those who wish can help in this matter - feedback and suggestions from the Russian-speaking audience can be sent to maps.ru [at] decarta.com. Also noteworthy is the fact that deCarta has a certain shortage of Russian-speaking employees, so for someone active help in improving the service can result in full-fledged employment.