HERE (the company that provides Garmin's City Navigator Map data, formerly known as NAVTEQ) making some changes to their policies. Their maps are very useful for general information, with some nice aerials and specialized things like a special appearance on mobile devices and realtime traffic. Even more useful, their maps cover the whole world. If you aren't familiar with HERE, this is an example of their aerials plus roads
https://boydsmaps.com/#17.00/39.818705/-74.535649/hereHybrid/0.00/0.00
HERE's account changes may result in my needing to limit access to these maps or (worst case) completely discontinue them. I've been able to offer them at no cost because they had a very generous allowance of free map tiles in the existing plan. I'm going to have to dig deeper into the details and give this some further consideration. Have never come close to the limit of their free map tiles in the past, but it appears they are greatly reducing what you can get for free now and to continue I will need to actually open an account and give them a credit card number that will automatically be used if I exceed the free limit (Google Maps made a similar change several years ago, so I guess they're finally catching up). Anyway, a quick review suggests that boydsmaps usage is very close to the limit of their new free plan. Going over the limit isn't terribly expensive (unless WAY over), but I still don't like having that kind of liability.
So this is just a heads-up for now. They have set a deadline of December 31 to migrate to their new plan, so I'll be pondering this. Worst case, I might just get rid of HERE completely. That would be too bad but maybe they're just a bad fit for a free site like boydsmaps. Another possible change would be to reduce the number of maps or maybe to limit their geographic coverage so that people in other countries or regions can't use them.
More info to come...
https://boydsmaps.com/#17.00/39.818705/-74.535649/hereHybrid/0.00/0.00
HERE's account changes may result in my needing to limit access to these maps or (worst case) completely discontinue them. I've been able to offer them at no cost because they had a very generous allowance of free map tiles in the existing plan. I'm going to have to dig deeper into the details and give this some further consideration. Have never come close to the limit of their free map tiles in the past, but it appears they are greatly reducing what you can get for free now and to continue I will need to actually open an account and give them a credit card number that will automatically be used if I exceed the free limit (Google Maps made a similar change several years ago, so I guess they're finally catching up). Anyway, a quick review suggests that boydsmaps usage is very close to the limit of their new free plan. Going over the limit isn't terribly expensive (unless WAY over), but I still don't like having that kind of liability.
So this is just a heads-up for now. They have set a deadline of December 31 to migrate to their new plan, so I'll be pondering this. Worst case, I might just get rid of HERE completely. That would be too bad but maybe they're just a bad fit for a free site like boydsmaps. Another possible change would be to reduce the number of maps or maybe to limit their geographic coverage so that people in other countries or regions can't use them.
More info to come...
Need to update some code to make that happen, but you should expect to lose access to all the HERE maps tomorrow. It appears that this high usage is due to my continued use of their legacy API, which results in a 15x increase in billable map tiles under the new plan (!) Re-writing the site code to use the new API would help, but I think these expensive commercial maps are no longer a good fit for boydsmaps.
Will have a look tomorrow, try using Chrome if you need access in the meantime., sorry.
