Using Retrofit to Interact with WebAPIs in Android

Managing API calls can sometimes be a pain in the ass. You need to manage making calls to the server, take care of JSON serilization and deserilization and then inflate the layout form the data. Most of my time during android development previously was spent in doing this work. Recently I discovered a library which makes this task so much simpler. Square has a wonderful library called Retrofit and i have became a fan.

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Creating After and Before Map Using OpenStreetMap

We can create after and before maps easily using freely available map data and tools. In this post we will learn to make after before slider for OpenStreetMap using tools Maperative, Leaflet and Github pages. We will use the Maperative to create map tiles for older OSM data and Leaflet side by side control to create a before after slider. We will then host the tiles and the before after maps using github pages. We will be making the after and before map of Nepal using the current OSM data of Nepal and the January 1st, 2015 older data of Nepal. We will be using ubuntu 16.04 as our operating system for the tutorial but the tools can be used in other operating systems as well.

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Beginning of OSM Community in Bhutan

World Bank Bhutan in consultation with the Thimphu Thromde partnered with Kathmandu Living Labs(KLL) and Humanitarian OpenStreetMap(HOT) team to start the OpenStreetMap(OSM) movement in Bhutan. The plan was to sensitize the government officials and build their capacity to create and use map data using open source platforms like OpenStreetMap and QGIS. We also had planned on training students from Royal Thimphu College(RTC) on crowdsource gis and mapping in OSM.

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