tecznotes

One of the main tasks I needed to handle for my project with Oakland's CrimeWatch application (previous: I, II, III, IV) was a Flash-based display for maps of criminal events. Darren, Shawn, and I banged out what has now been released as Modest Maps. As it turns out, a whole bunch of other current projects needed the same thing, so development has been rapid over the past few months and we're now at a point we feel comfortable calling 1.0 beta.

Modest Maps is a BSD-licensed display and interaction library for tile-based maps in Adobe Flash 7+, written in ActionScript 2.0.

Our intent is to provide a minimal, extensible, customizable, and free display library for discriminating designers and developers who want to use interactive maps in their own projects. Modest Maps provides a core set of features in a tight, clean package, with plenty of hooks for additional functionality.

Future releases may include display layers in ActionScript 3.0 and WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), but for now it's a kick-ass tile-display engine that can pull in map layers from a variety of sources.