Get blisteringly quick and highly customisable maps with our feature, Draw a Map! It's an all singing, all dancing, freehand drawing tool for drawing completely bespoke geographic searches. Great on tablets, too!
It is possible to freehand draw a shape around any area in the UK, edit it to perfection and search for properties that match your requirements in your desired area.
The ease of use and speed of the tool shrouds the complexity under the hood. Our developer, former physicist and numerical algorithm enthusiast, Jack Roberts, developed a concave hull algorithm for the software. For those who aren't maths inclined, here's a quick outline of what goes on.
I imagine that if you're still reading at this point, you're wondering why, for the example given, would we need such an overkill algorithm to reproduce a C shape?
You're officially Not Wrong™ and for a lot of use cases, this algorithm is overkill. But we like a good bit of maths and we like to try and cover all possible use cases. Since our software is facing outwards to the web, we want to cater for all people irrespective of what shape they wish to draw. So if someone draws this:
Our algorithm gets rid of all the rubbish on the inside and produces this:
Neat, eh?
