amCharts & amMap blog

Maps of Mexico and Nicaragua with region borders were added in v 2.1.6.

Okinawa prefecture was added in map of Japan.

A lot of amCharts and amMap users asked me whether it is possible to export charts and maps in any vector format so that they could use them for high resolution prints. Recently I made some digging and found that yes, it is possible!

This method requires some additional software to be installed on your computer, so you can’t make this available for everybody; however, I guess, that in most cases there will be a limited number of people in your company who will be using this function.

Using this method you will be able to save charts as vector PDF, EPS or PS files but also as bitmaps – PNG, JPG, BMP, PCX and TIFF. And this will not require web server and will be done much faster when using default amCharts’ “export as image” feature. So I would recommend use “export as image” function only if you need this feature to be public.

Here is a tutorial about exporting flash charts to PDF and other formats.

AmMap v 2.1.2 has the following new features/fixes:

1. balloon border (color, alpha and width are configurable)
2. lock zoom toolbar, text box and small map
3. disable small map interaction
4. flicker right after map is loaded fixed

I receive some nice feedback from amCharts and amMap users time to time, however don’t have a "Testimonials" page. But I can’t not share this one:

Wow! I must say that your products are amazing!

With just a little bit of time on Google I found your amMap. Of course,  when I first saw it, I thought "Cool! But we can’t use it." Because I needed a custom map of Missouri, I didn’t think your product was viable. But, I kept coming back to it - it just wouldn’t leave me alone! It was way too cool! Well, the more I evaluated, the more viable it became. And the documentation about creating customized maps sent it over the top. Nothing else - and I do mean NOTHING - that I had reviewed came anywhere close. It was very intuitive and easy to use. Well, in a very short time, I was able to complete the project. It debuted on "Super Tuesday" (Feb 5, 2008) at http://www.sos.mo.gov/enrmaps/.

The basis of the project was to provide a series of maps/charts that showed who was leading the 2008 presidential preference primary in Missouri based on party and which counties had completed their vote totals. With the live data we already collected with an older application, watching the maps and charts change dynamically was really exciting! We usually get quite a bit of traffic anyway, but it increased  with the interactive maps! We were mentioned by Karl Rove on the national Fox News broadcast and have been receiving many comments since  about how fantastic the pages were and how did we do it.

Of course, I owe it all to you! I’m debating on whether to continue being selfish and hording you as my secret weapon, or being nice and sharing the info. Of course, in the end I’ll have to share, but I wanted  to first contact you.  Again, thanks for such wonderful products! Keep up the excellent work!

Erica Gage
Missouri Secretary of State
http://www.sos.mo.gov

If you’d like to leave some feedback on amCharts & amMap, you can post comments here, from now on this will be a testimonials page. Thank you!

Interactive maps of Italy and Spain were added to the package. Fla files of maps files are available for enterprise license owners.

After the release of ammap 2.0 some users have decided to share their maps with all of you. So I launched "free maps" page where these contributed maps will appear. You can find the New Zealand map on this page now, but soon I will add several more. I invite you to join this initiative!

I also added a tutorial about creating custom maps.

Since v 2.1.0 you can pass data and settings directly from HTML file. Open ammap.html file in the main folder of downloaded package and view the source of it. You will notice several commented lines there.

This line is can be used for passing data directly to HTML:

so.addVariable(”map_data”, escape(’<map ……>……</map>’));

instead of <map ……>……</map> you have to place xml formatted map data in one line.

The same is with settings:

so.addVariable(”map_settings”, escape(’<settings>….</settings>’);

There is one more variable - “additional_map_settings“. You can use it for appending some map settings. This is useful, if you have several maps with similar settings, and you have one file for all of them, but let’s say you want to make some small differences. You can use this variable for that:

so.addVariable(”additional_map_settings”, escape(’<settings>…</settings>’);

In v 2.1.0 you can also have multiple settings files. To use several settings files, separate them with commas:

so.addVariable(”settings_file”, escape(”ammap/ammap_settings.xml,ammap/ammap_settings2.xml”));

Download ammap

Since v 2.0.13 you can set selected areas color:

for all areas in settings file:

<area>
   …
   <color_selected>#0000CC</color_selected>

for one area in data file:

<area color_selected=”#00CC00″ …..>

I noticed that in some situations you might want to disable rollover the area effect, balloon and click when you select this area. For example, you click on some country, map is zoomed to it, and then you show some inside movie clips. In this case it would be better if only those movie clips would be clickable, and the area would not. Now you can easily do this by setting:

<area>
   …
   <disable_when_clicked>true</disable_when_clicked>

This can be done since 2.0.13

Download amMap

Some people reported me a bug - loaded swf files are not active, all behaviors are disabled. This happened because I applied roll-over an click events for all loaded movies.

In v 2.0.12 I fixed this problem. Of course, the movies original behaviors will work only if this movie is “not clickable” and doesn’t have a balloon to display.

“Not clickable” means that this movie doesn’t have description, url and zoom level set. And the balloon must be disabled by setting balloon=”false” attribute for this point.

Download ammap.