Google Launches Mapping Service

Alex Reynolds writes "The beta version of Google Maps is now online, offering an alternative to Mapquest with what some might describe as a very much improved user interface, offering a cleaner layout, drop shadows, clickable waypoints and keyboard controls that allow you to move and zoom the map. For IE and Firefox/Mozilla at this point (no Safari or Opera support, as yet)."

Comments

Re: Map24 is great!

[LittleKing]

Wow, Map24 is great, it didn't even find my parent's address correctly. It labeled their street wrong and gave their actual name to another street. Their road name is Woodland Drive. Map24 labled it Woodland Road. It then labeled a street fairly close by called Windwood as Woodland Dr.

Man I should use map24 for all my needs as I probably wouldn't find a thing correctly.

Just to try to ward of some of the -mod points, I'm sure it does get most thing right.

LK

Here are some reasons why Google's fails:

[hacker]

Here are a few brief reasons why Google's mapping service fails, and will not ever be as good as much of the competition (MapBlast, MapQuest, etc.)

1. Requires javascript , so I can't use it from my PDA, cellphone, or automated with Perl to fetch and print maps for me.
2. No turn-by-turn maps for driving directions
3. No markers for one-way streets and directions
4. Their "Print" view is exactly the same as their non-print view.
5. No PDA version at all (ala MapBlast)

For people who want to go "Ooo... pretty map", it will be fine, but for people who actually use mapping services to navigate, or use them from non-full-blown-desktop browsers (cell, WAP, PDA), this service is useless.

Why Google insists on building everything they do upon reams of Javascript, is beyond me.

Move along, nothing to see here.

Re:You can drag the map !

[jc42]

you need to edit your binary search paths ($PATH) ...

That sort of thing should already have been handled by the OS.

Yeah; that's fine if you aren't using java for anything else. It's fairly common for java users to have more than one version installed. Often this is because there are apps out there that require a specific jvm. With the ability to have a different $PATH in different windows, it's possible to solve such problems.

Of course, eventually you'll likely find that this is unnecessary, and all this can be set up automagically when you log in. But java developers will still insist on the ability to install more than one jvm, and choose among them when running a java app.

The fact that you want your hand held behind the scenes doesn't mean that the rest of us shouldn't be allowed to use the full power of our system.

(And, of course, the OS should have nothing whatsoever to do with setting the $PATH variable. That should be done by whatever login app you're using. If it's tied into the OS, you're using a system that has a very bad engineering design. ;-)