Friday 7 September 2012

Map Demo 3.0

For several years on-and-off, I've been working on a demo to showcase compression techniques and to try to sate my curiosity in cartography and country-based statistics. I've just uploaded the latest incarnation: Version 3.0.


This is a bog-standard 32-bit Windows application with all the data embedded within it. Compiling the supplied source code with Visual C 2008 produces an executable of just 118KB; compressing this with UPX brings it down to 84KB, mainly through instruction-stream compression.

The pertinent features are: 
  1. Coastline and border data for 214 countries (including South Sudan and Montenegro);
  2. Over one hundred statistics and codes for each country;
  3. Vector-drawn flags for each country;
  4. 128 map projections;
  5. Choropleth statistically mapping;
  6. The ability to save the data table as a CSV file (significantly larger than the executable!); and
  7. The ability to save maps and flags as Windows Enhanced Metafiles.

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