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Google Adds Satellite Imagery to Maps
Ant writes "BetaNews reports that Google quietly updated its maps service late Monday to include satellite imagery, a first in the industry... Much of Google Maps remains the same - just with detailed pictures from high-tech satellites instead of standard map graphics. Maps can be dragged to view adjacent areas, which means users do not have click and wait for graphics to reload. Zooming is also instantaneous with the help of a slider placed atop the map." The resolution doesn't seem very high, but the integration is very seamless.
This isn't an industry first, unless perhaps it's real-time.
maybe they actually were taking aeriel satellite photos last Friday. Has google pulled another GMail-like fast one on us all?
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
Great googly-moogly. Stop with cheap low-res sat photos and try adding a scale to your maps. You know, one of the basic features of a map? The little hashed bar that gives me some idea how far it is from one point on the map to another. I realize it is not innovative or amazingly cool, but it kinda renders your maps useless otherwise.
- Resize the image to various resolutions
- Break the images into 200x200 pixel chunks at each resolution and save those chunks as individual image files
- Put a javascript interface on
Rather than working with fixed resolution images, you're must better off using wavelet compression to store your images. As well as up to 50:1 compression ratios, you can easily stream out whatever resolution you need, without having to uncompress all the data first. ECW and related formats have been used by GIS systems for many years, long before Google joined the party. Still, it's nice to see so much information publically available.I'm certainly looking forward to when Google add the UK data, so I don't have to rely on the limited service from GetMapping
The satellite imagery is nice and all, but it's not very high quality, nor is it anywhere close to the first in the industry - Mapquest had it for years.
But really, with all the gee whiz about this stuff, Google has totally missed two very important things:
1. A scale! There's no scale on the maps at all! How hard is this to implement, fercrissakes?!
2. Printable routes. The neat purple line overlay showing your driving route is not printed by most browsers (IE/Firefox). Very annoying.
These are really, really easy things for them to implement. I'm stunned that they overlooked it.
I can see my van parked in my driveway.
Frankly, I don't really want more than that accessible to the masses.
No Comment.
Isn't the point of beta to test and criticize it?
Let me get this straight... You're breaking CSS stylesheets with rules that you wrote because some websites do annoying things with them. These rules screw up Google's site, and you expect Google to rewrite their site? It's not going to happen.
I have a rule in my userContent.css that sets display: none for embedded iframes, because some websites use them in obnoxious ways, but if a legitimate site has one, I'm not going to tell them that they need to change everything just because my user stylesheet is interfering with their site. I'd try to hack around it, and if I couldn't do that, I could either take the rule out and stop browsing annoying websites, or deal with it like anyone else who doesn't have a user stylesheet. Telling other sites not to use something because you don't like it is like telling everyone you know to talk louder because you're going deaf and don't want a hearing aid.
Bears don't normally eat things that talk and move backwards.