Feb 8

Google Maps

Google Maps: This is the smoothest map interface I’ve ever seen, and it found my house, tucked away in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

View the source on that baby. Someone tells me how it works. Doesn’t seem to be Flash, but I didn’t have the patience to dig through it all.

by Deane   February 8, 2005 8:04 AM   |
  tags: 
Google

Comments

by warpech,   February 8, 2005 8:19 AM  

I guess it's XMLHttpRequest, again. The same technology used in Gmail. The future of rich web apps!

http://www.google.com/search?q=XMLHttpRequest http://www.allinthehead.com/retro/241/xmlhttprequest-for-the-masses

by Simon Willison,   February 8, 2005 8:26 AM  

It's one big ugly mass of JavaScript - grab http://www.google.com/mapfiles/maps.1.js and paste it in to http://www.prettyprinter.de/

by Deane,   February 8, 2005 9:50 AM  

Just for fun, I've attempted to and succeeded in finding all of the homes of my childhood without using the search. I just start at the national map then zoom in, re-position, and zoom again. I've found every single one for which I can remember the address (we moved a lot, so there's about a dozen).

by Dave,   February 8, 2005 9:55 AM  

That is impressive. I entered the name of the park near my house, and it brought it up right off. In Firefox, that is. One major problem though...

"Your browser is not supported by Google Maps just yet... We are working on supporting Safari."

They give Safari users the opportunity to blast ahead anyway, but the whole thing fails miserably if you want to do anything but look at the US map. Dang I hate being left out in the cold.

by Deane,   February 8, 2005 1:24 PM  

I've been playing with this some more today, and I agree with Joseph Scott:

"Unless something goes horribly wrong, I expect this to simply explode in usage. By the end of the week everyone and their cat will be talking about this."

http://joseph.randomnetworks.com/archives/2005/02/07/google-maps/

It's a stunning piece of work. How does Google keep stuff like this quiet?

by Matt Smith,   February 10, 2005 10:03 AM  

This article has a good review of the underlying technology: http://jgwebber.blogspot.com/2005/02/mapping-google.html

by Nic J,   April 13, 2005 5:09 AM  

Hey,

Check out my Google Maps directory: http://gmaps.nicj.net

Add maps!

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