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Google Offers Hybrid Satellite and Map View
That's Unpossible! writes "Google Maps now offers a hybrid view which combines their map view with their satellite view. The Google blog has a notice on the update. It appears to use 8-bit alpha transparent PNGs to make it work."
They've had arrows pointing out traffic flow for a while now... as far as I know. (Because I used it a while ago to see traffic flow for a certain city...)
Mapper of Doom has had this for quite some time, albeit with existing data from Terraserver.
http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel 9.InternetExplorerSupportForPNG
/. is good for you.
They added a scale since the last time I checked the maps, too! Halleluah!
It was these arrows that saved a man from a traffic ticket: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/20/180231 &tid=133&tid=217&tid=1
The pinpoint for my house is shown a half block off... not nice for anyone looking for directions. While it may not seem like a big deal... in some areas where there are no discernible building numbers, this could really suck.
As far as IE png transparency... apparently MS slipped in an update with a recent patch... or for IE, both map and sat are combined into one png.
It's pretty neat - the satellite photos are no longer wrapped around a cylinder (making places far away north or south from equator look squished).
Unfortunately there still isn't maps available for Europe besides England. I hope it would arrive soon.
- Peter Brodersen; professional nerd
There are a couple of different ways to achieve transparent PNGs in IE - besides simple 100% transparent colors (as known from gifs). The Google overlay isn't simply 100% transparent. The same goes for the "speech bubble" when clicking on different places.
T ML_and_VML
There are a couple of different methods. The Google Maps API mentions one:
http://www.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/#XH
- Peter Brodersen; professional nerd
As for the purple line floating over the highway, that's an active research area. The military is pumping a lot of dollars into augmented reality. I've gotten to see a few shots of some of their demo tech and it's pretty cool stuff. Now they just have to make it work correctly all the time and give proper depth queing... heheh
Someday, though. Someday!
OK, so as sort of a meta-reply to all the posters asking about IE and PNG support, here's 2 interesting hacks you can use to get your PNG magic rolling in MSIE.
MSIE (as of v6) doesn't support 32 bit transparent PNGs natively, but there is a cool hack where you can dither them down to 8 bits, retaining translucenct for browsers that support it, and using 1-bit transparency in MSIE, so it still looks OK.
Alternatively, you can use the AlphaImageLoader() filter for near native IE PNG support -- that's a link to my own free CSS behavior that automatically adds IMG and background-image support for PNGs to MSIE 5.5+.
Either way, PNGs rock, except for the lack of a cross-platform gamma standard -- if you need to match other colours on your site, just use JPEGs/GIFs.
<!-- DHTML / JavaScript menu, popup tooltip, Ajax scripts -->
The accuracy of the overlay seems to vary according to the elevation of the area and also the image itslf.
Because of the fact that sattilites can only zoom in so far and still have a good image, in areas where you can zoom all the way in, they have to use airplanes to take pictures. Nevertheless, these survery airplanes have to maintain a perfect or almost perfect parallellness with the ground or else the image will look shifted. In places where the overlays are not very exact, the most common reason is than when the sattilite image was taken, the survey plane's camera was not pointing straight down and resulted in a shifted overlay in relation to the real image.
And I find his GUI better than Google's. It's slicker, and the ability to adjust the transparency (slider at the bottom) is quite innovative. As is also the ability to move the foreground or background and have the other align itself accordingly.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
http://ark42.com/google/gmapcache/
I too wonder where they get their data. I was looking at a couple of mapping apps a few weeks ago, playing with a GPS puck I got for my birthday, and I think one of those shows the same stupid mistakes in the streets. It was either Microsoft Streets and Trips, or it was Rand McNally Streetfinder. I don't remember which, and right now I don't have either loaded because my disk drive died...
The satellite view shows my pool, though, so - Hey!! I can see my pool from space!!
Here's an example of where the satellite imagery is newer than the map. The Ottawa River Parkway was moved around the new War Museum.
It's not so great in some parts of Toronto.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
The reason why I still use Yahoo Maps is because it prints better than Google Maps. The last time I tried printing was around 2 months ago. I couldn't get the map to display the route Google plotted in the zoom level I wanted (or print with a destination bubble). Google defaults to the initial route zoom (fairly high level). The printout of the text directions also was too large using too many sheets of paper. It didn't produce any output when I printed from Firefox--I had to use IE in order to get my output. Printer is a PS-based printer.
Google has fixed the problem with output problems in Firefox and the text size.
Submitted bug.
There is map.search.ch with this feature since a long time. In addition map.search.ch feature satellite images of higher resolution, is very intuitive to use, and has many nifty features when hovering over displayed icons (schedules on bus-stops or train stations, temperature reading of public swimming-pools, amount of free lots on parkings).
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