Faster Local Communication ... with awesome maps: GeoCha uses MapBox now!

Speed is crucial for mobile local communication systems

Local mobile communication systems like GeoCha need to be fast. There are many ways to improve the speed of webapps, e.g. optimizing css & image sprites, javascript refactoring, well choosen external services and scalable hosting architecture and many more.

As maps are one of our most important user interface elements we kept constantly looking for the best provider...

GeoCha maps switched from Google Maps to MapBox.com

We finally decided to switch to mapbox. Since the load times of geocha app improved a lot. Besides the default styling of mapbox maps looks awesome and we now are preparing special styles for a couple of our geocha group - apps.

Google Maps drawbacks:

- Classic and boring look and feelfile://localhost/var/folders/xf/rq_fq7s16358qw6nm3xrbfrr0000gn/T/com.skitch.skitch/Screenshot_GeoCha_-_MapBox_16_54.jpg

- Vague clearing and settlement system

- Google API is unnecessarily complex

MapBox is awesome and soon will have vector only maps which would boost our webapps loading times again.