You may have noticed we’ve added a short announcement to the service home page indicating there are a few new tools being added next week.  Here’s a taster of what’s coming……..

Buffer Tool

We’re adding an exciting new tool to the annotations toolbar.  Buffering is a common term used in spatial analysis and means identifying a zone of a specified distance around a particular feature.  Our new tool – the point buffer tool – allows you to click a point on the map from which you’d like to draw a circle of a certain size.  You determine the radius of the circle from the point you identify either by selecting a distance from the list we’ve provided or one you enter yourself. The tool accepts distances in miles and kilometres and is a great way to draw exactly a circle of a certain size.  If you like the tool let us know because we could even offer a line buffer tool that would enable you to carry out the same analysis from a line feature you draw – great for identifying features a certain distance from a road or river or a walk you’ve plotted yourself.

Welcome to the font picker!

You’ll be able to add more interesting styles of text next week as we’re introducing 7 font types and a range of sizes from 10 to 96 all in a drop down selector you’ll be familiar with, enjoy!

Label in Miles

Back in January we updated our measure line tool so that you could ask it to return distances in miles as well as kilometres.  You liked this enhancement a lot but of course you instantly said, what about the measurement label tool?  We’ve updated that now too so you can also have your measurement labels in miles or kilometres!

Elastic Photos!

Another feature we added back in January was the ability to add photos as a new annotation type to your map.  While this was a really useful new annotation type, you told us you really would like to be able to place the photo at a position/distance relevant to the pin of your choice.  We listened, and now we have elastic photos!  It’s so simple to do – once your photo appears on the map, pick up the Move Feature tool, then click on your photo and spin it round and round the pin, watch out you might get dizzy it’s so much fun!

Active Tool

Something that catches quite a few of us out is not knowing which tool is active.  We go to pan the map and still have the draw line tool active and start accidentally drawing a new line, much to our frustration!  To reduce the likelihood of this happening we’ve changed our tool icons so that when the tool is active the button background turns white – so there’s no missing the active tool now!

And finally, start again really does start again!

It’s a small one, but we felt the Start Again button should not just take you back to the GB view, but it really should clear all annotations also – it just makes more sense.

As ever we’d love to hear your views on the new tools after you’ve had a play.  Email us at edina@ed.ac.uk anytime with your feedback.