JavaScript popup for GEM maps

What's up ... .... well, a popup . So you have collected a set of maps or aerial photos using Gem. We talk here about the big square maps MapQuest was using until the end of 2003. If you started your Gem life in 2004 or later, this little gadget will unfortunately be of no use to you. Many users have asked in the past for a Linux version of Gem or just for open-sourcing the program. Although that's still in the planning, it will take some time. In between I have created this JavaScript utility that allows you to diplay, zoom and pan your maps. It doesn't do any downloading of missing maps, it's just a dedicated image viewer. What this little script allows you to do, is to use a browser to view your maps, with the result that any platform and OS can suddenly be used for your maps. The maps can be stored in a directory tree on your local system, or you can put the maps, with an html page and the script on a web-server. Somewhere at the start of the script, there is a variable "root" which you can use to point the script to the top of your directory tree with maps and images. Aerial Photos Panning and Zooming Using the script is pretty self explanatory, but to be 100% complete, here are a few instructions. Click on the overview map and wait till the popup window appears. On slower computers this can take a little. Then use the arrows on the side to pan and click on the map itself to zoom in. If the requested map doesn't exist, the window will be white. How to zoom out is a bit less obvious, but when you click on the map along its edge, it will not zoom in but go back to a larger scale image. For copyright reasons I do not store MapQuest maps on my web-site. So when you click on the map below, the popup window will be empty. When you click on the aerial photo above, you will see the "world scale" image of Living Earth, which I can do, because it's in the public domain. Trying to zoom in further, will not work, because I don't have those images on my site. This page is only a placeholder, you should add it to your own collection of maps. Cartographic Maps Finally This script would allow you to put the maps you downloaded from MapQuest and GeoExplorer on a public website. Don't do that!! Such an act will heavily violate copyright laws. You have been warned...

  Willem van Schaik, Calgary, January 2004     http://www.schaik.com/wwwillem.html