Mapping Google Maps

jgwebber writes "Google Maps is starting to cause a bit of a stir as Google makes the browser do still more backflips than most expected. In the tradition of dissecting Google Suggest and GMail, I've done a little dissecting of this newest service."

Comments

what about plotting waypoints on the map?

[garcia]

What I would like to see them add is something like what GPSVisualizer does. It will allow you to upload a GPX or LOC file of waypoints (from your GPS or various other programs) and plot them on a map. Because GPSVisualizer requires the SVG plugin (or native support) it would be nice to have an advanced application like Google has that doesn't require such support yet is as smooth/speedy as Google Maps is.

It would be awesome if Google could completely take over the commercial mapping software application market (ie Streets and Trips/Mappoint and Street Atlas) by enabling routing/directions between the points on the map. Hell, allow us to then download the planned route back to the GPSs via a GPX and that would really rock. I mean web-based applications such as maps.google.com and maps.yahoo.com have already taken over from older programs like Automap which just gave text directions and simple maps. Why can't they add even more features? I don't know anyone that asks for directions anymore. Everyone just uses the web-based software.

For now I'm just happy being impressed by the pretty scrolling. I'm excited to see what comes of this after the finish up the Beta.

Re:what about plotting waypoints on the map?

[Moby Cock]

Remember that Google purchased Keyhole a while back. They are a satellite imaging firm. I wonder (or hope) that somehow this technology could be merged with the excellent Google maps. Imagine a "See Photo" button once you have found the location of whatever it was you were looking for. Now that would be cool.

Re:what about plotting waypoints on the map?

[parkrrrr]

And fortunately for us, Google makes it easy by giving us JavaScript code to decrypt the "points" string, and it does indeed contain latitudes and longitudes. Here's the equivalent Perl code, with almost all the same variable names as their JS code, with leading indentation stripped (thanks Slashdot!) Encoded string in $XX, decoded lat/lon pairs to stdout in CSV format. Feed that output to GPSBabel as "arc" format, and you should be able to simplify it and upload it to your GPS receiver.

my $Ch=length($XX);
my $pb = 0;
my @aa;
my $Ka = 0;
my $Pa = 0;

while($pb<$Ch) {
my $ub;
my $oc=0;
my $Fa=0;
do {
$ub=ord(substr($XX,$pb++,1))-63;
$Fa |= ($ub&31)<<$oc;
$oc+=5;
} while($ub>=32);

$Ka=$Ka+(($Fa&1)?((1-$Fa)/2):($Fa>>1));
push @aa, $Ka;
$oc=0;
$Fa=0;
do {
$ub=ord(substr($XX, $pb++, 1))-63;
$Fa |= ($ub&31)<<$oc;
$oc+=5;
} while($ub>=32);
$Pa=$Pa+(($Fa&1)?((1-$Fa)/2):($Fa>>1));
push @aa, $Pa;
}

for (my $i = 0; $i< $#aa; $i++) {
print $aa[$i]/1e5 . ', ' . $aa[++$i]/1e5 . "\n";
}

Re:what about plotting waypoints on the map?

[Deviate_X]

http://map.search.ch/ is more similar to Keyhole (on the dynamics) and and even more interesting use of dhtml than googles first attempt.

Nice as a video game engine

[192939495969798999]

I'd like to see a MMORPG ported for this, like a web-enabled version of ultima 1 that shows where everyone's looking, and we can all interact. How awesome would that be? Totally.

Why aren't competitors beating Google to market?

[Anonymous Cowdog]

Google is hitting a lot of the obvious sweetspots for improving the user experience. Some of them are obvious only in retrospect. But we know their competitors have smart people, and they do UI research, and they have resources. Why does Google come out with innovation after innovation?

I have three answers. I wonder which ones are valid:

1. Laziness
2. Encumberance with legacy political and business issues (is feature x threatening to partner Fooinc, how can we hang ads on this, etc.)
3. Focus on fancy-pants analysis of numbers (data mining to try to optimise, rather than revolutionize), leading them to be blind to simple measures like using Javascript and caching lots of content in the client.

What other reasons are there?

What WOULD you call Google's approach?

[dpbsmith]

It's not quite AI, yet Google comes closer to realizing the fantasy of Isaac Asimov's Multivac than anything else I've experienced before. It's very weird: the impression that Google gives is that it does NOT understand your question, yet it DOES manage to find the answers you want.

It's not quite user-interface, in the sense of elegant widgets or consistency or any of that stuff. Google's traditional search features could almost run on Lynx on a green screen. Maybe they can. Google Maps is visually spiffy by comparison to Mapquest, but it's nothing we haven't seen in standalone programs years ago.

It isn't really "search." Or at least, if it is, with every new thing they roll out, Google does an amazing job of expanding my notion of what "search" means. What does it mean to "search" on "250 pounds in kilograms?"

Something that Google seems to share with Apple is some sort of courtesy or kindness or service orientation to the end-user. It just works. And unlike Microsoft or Apple, Google's services seem to come with fewer strings attached.

One of the things that delights me about Google is a certain kind of freshness I haven't seen elsewhere as often as I'd like. They have the characteristic you used to see in innovative software that when you describe the latest Google feature, it doesn't sound all that new, yet when you use it you get that feeling that something unexpected has been revealed.

Re:Why aren't competitors beating Google to market

[Ced_Ex]

4. Google allows side projects which likely hold more interest than actual business projects, hence are produced with creativity and passion.

Where this is going...

[RCulpepper]

I see some features that will tie in well with this. It already makes Local Search a lot more handy. I could see Google using aggregated GSM phone locator signals to forecast traffic patterns and then, after asking you when you intend to start and end your trip (so it can route you around traffic), estimating when you'll want to eat lunch, etc, so that bricks-and-mortar restaurants, gas stations on the selected route can pay for advertising - it's one segment of the economy Google has not yet touched.

Re:Google + DOM = Mozilla Juggernaut

[bcmm]

Have you seen this

Will this bother some Privacy Fanatics ?

[brandonp]

Of course, will this bother some people who are fanatical about Privacy issues?

John Smith in New York City, NY

Depending on how the results are categorized and obtained, this seems like it could be a hot issue.

Brandon Petersen

Google uses XUL

[fulldecent]

Here's the big secret:

Google uses XUL to develop all their rich websites. For example: Gmail, Maps, Groups and others on the way. This natively XUL interface is then converted to HTML/CSS/JavaScript that we can see and run. This conversion is done by a program Google wrote a while ago and the conversion is very simple. Of course, it's not perfect and needs to be loked over by hand. This is how Gmail is compatible now with all the other browsers.

In the future, when they decide it is time, they will publish their XUL interfaces side-by-side with their current interfaces. I'm not trying to give any hints, but this is related to a large push that Google is going to make to support XUL technology and will happen by the end of this year or early 2006.

Re:Google uses XUL

[christopherfinke]

An interesting example of Google XUL was mentioned earlier in the thread: Google XUL search page.

In addition to that,

[jdgreen7]

Imagine if they started using this for real estate searches, too. Just link all the local back-end MLS listings to whichever region you're searching in and end up with an MLS service that's better than what most realtors pay for. By partnering with some of the larger realty companies (Century 21, Remax, etc.), they could probably take over a good chunk of the industry in a matter of a few years and make it much easier for individuals to shop for houses without the assistance of a realtor...

Re:Google + DOM = Mozilla Juggernaut

[hey!]

Yeah, javascript might be a toy, although there's a bit more there than meets the eye, but DOM is definitely not a toy.

Languages are important, but even more important is the runtime environment they have access to. If the environment has the basic stuff you need, then even a crappy language would be pretty powerful. Think of a templating language like velocity -- it's not designed to be powerful by itself, but to be very convenient to integrate with a context that supplies it with everything it needs to do powerful things.

Years ago, in the era of of the 16MHz microprocessor, I had the problem of writing an Exel spreadsheet that required lookups from huge tables. Using VLOOKUP took hours. So I implemented a double hash algorithm in the Excel macro language. Mind you, this wasn't VB for apps, this was the nasty old lotus-y macro language. It turned out to be easy, because the spreadsheet environment provided most of the lumber I needed, I just had to snap it together.