It’s that time we always love – update announcements! That’s right, we’ve finished work on version 2.2 of our interactive map platform.  Although many of our customers have already started taking advantage of the new features in V2.2, we wanted to share our excitement with the rest of you.  Oh, best of all, as always, all the new features are available to our existing customers with no change to the price you pay. This is a commitment we take very seriously, and will continue to support into 2.2.1, 2.3, and beyond. So let’s get right into the two big exciting parts of this release.

Beautiful Mobile Maps

Our 2.1 release saw us take the first step towards mobile support with our section 508 compliant maps, but this was obviously underwhelming as a mobile map.  Our big goal with this release was to finally deliver a beautiful, proper mobile map. So yeah, we did that. And it’s pretty awesome. Now when you publish your map, you have the option to publish a mobile map along with it. Just link the URI in your mobile site, or include it in an iframe, and you’re good to go. It uses our same underlying architecture, but is optimized for mobile devices using jQuery Mobile. Want to give it a try? Visit the link below on your phone or tablet for an example.
http://cdn.nucloud.com/maps/270/index.enhanced.mobile.html

For those keeping score, that means we’re offering the holy trinity of mapping platforms:

  1. Desktop
  2. Mobile
  3. Accessible

Customize Your Map with Custom CSS

One of the common requests we regularly hear from customers that they would like to have more control over the look and feel of their map.  With this in mind, our second big goal with 2.2 was to allow users to plug in their own custom CSS into their maps for greater control over layouts for folks comfortable poking around in the HTML. Better still, we’ve enabled that on every map type separately, giving you nearly universal control over how your map looks. We will continue to offer and expand our selection of predesigned templates as well, but this was an important feature that our customers had identified a desire for, and we wanted to make that a reality.  If you don’t feel comfortable in CSS this also gives us much more control to design a unique map to your detailed specs.

Additional Small Enhancements

Of course, we didn’t stop there, and made several UI improvements – such as making layer selections easier. The little things matter as much as the big, so we packed in as many tweaks as we could, both on the back and front end. We think you’ll definitely approve.

So that’s a fast look at 2.2. We’re already hard at work planning 2.3, plus some other surprises in store for this year, so stay tuned!