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."

what about plotting waypoints on the map?

What I would like to see them add is something like what GPSVisualizer [gpsvisualizer.com] 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:Old info

It fairly successfully mapped Folsom, CA to Wilsey, KS which is not on many maps. It even has the friggen farm roads in it's database!

I love how you can clock on a waypoint in the directions and it pops up a bubble window in the main map with a closeup detail!
-nB

Re:Old info

What, you thought those black helicopters belonged to the government?

Re:what about plotting waypoints on the map?

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?

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

Re:what about plotting waypoints on the map?

Have you tried usaphotomaps from JDMCOX [jdmcox.com]?

USAPhotoMaps downloads aerial photo and topo map data from Microsoft's free TerraServer Web site, saves it on your hard drive, and creates seamless maps from it. You can:
1. See the latitude/longitude
2. Add waypoints, routes, and text
3. Jump to any waypoint or latitude/longitude in the U.S.A.
4. Transfer waypoints, tracks, and routes to and from most GPS receivers
5. See your GPS location
6. Scroll and zoom

And it's free.

Re:what about plotting waypoints on the map?

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?

For now I'm just happy being impressed by the pretty scrolling

I scrolled right for a long time but Europe never came into view.

In addition to that,

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:Still doesn't work with Safari

The problem isn't with javascript, it's with XSLT. If you read the article, you'll notice that the XML transforms are done using XSLT -- and Safari is currently the only browser I've used that doesn't support XSLT. Supposedly it will be in the next version of Safari, so it looks like Google has decided to use it now, and let the browser catch up, instead of using an older technology hack. I hope this provides some incentive for the Safari team to get XSLT working soon, as I have a number of projects that depend on it. http://www.plattiblog.com/2004/08/16.html [plattiblog.com] seems to hint that there has been some progress.

Google + DOM = Mozilla Juggernaut

Google is bravely doing fantastic thing with client-side programming...something many websites have given up on because of cross-browser incompatibility. My money is definitely on Google being very aggressive with Mozilla/XUL based on this work. That's going to be good times!

Re:Google + DOM = Mozilla Juggernaut

Have you seen this [google.com]

Re:Google + DOM = Mozilla Juggernaut

You forgot to thank Microsoft for going outside of the standards and implementing XMLHttpRequest in IE5.0. Got so popular everyone started copying it. You see how gmail and google maps can change the content page without loading up a new page? Thats XMLHttpRequest, non standardized browser object.

RTFA

Google Maps is using a hidden iframe to send messages back and forth

Re:Google + DOM = Mozilla Juggernaut

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.

backflips?

Either the browser supports it, or doesn't... stop personifying software... it does what it designed to do. Just because other pages out there don't use certain features doesn't mean the browser is doing some amazing task by supporting features.

Re:backflips?

...stop personifying software...

I agree, software hates being personified.

Re:backflips?

Trust me, getting PNG transparancy / Alpha Channel support in IE is a backflip.

Re:Safari support

it is too bad that even Google can't get a webpage to render properly on any modern browser, such as Safari.

Safari doesn't support XSLT. It's not google's fault that Safari is behind even IE6 in this respect.

Whoa!

Find: insufferable whiners in Washington, DC

Not bad, Google!

Re:Whoa!

insufferable whiners

That's just beautiful. It also works wonderfully well with the old Slashdot favourite, 'miserable failures'.

Re:Whoa!

And of course, try this:

litigious bastards in salt lake city

One hit. Guess who...

Re:Whoa!

you might be on to something...

"liberal wacko in Washington, DC" comes up with CNN, PBS, and the Washington Post. Spot on!

Scrolling only partially works

All you people complaining about Safari compatibility... For some reason I can't get my maps to scroll after they've been printed. I've tried using Epson and Canon printers. If anyone can help let me know.

Re:Scrolling only partially works

As funny as this may be, it *would* be very handy if they supported a way of first printing the textual directions, and then using their interface to select and zoom views of discrete chunks of the 'directions', and then being able to cleanly print each view that you select (just the map, not the text again each time)

Nice as a video game engine

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.

Endless pursuit

Kinda like what Endless Pursuit [endlesspursuit.com] has done? You upload you waypoints/tracks, it overlays them on a topo you view from your browser. Dont think it needs any plugins, as the overlay is done by the server and is output as a normal image.

I once had an idea of doing this, and might eventually get around to finishing it. I just dont have the map library to do the overlay. All I could do is draw the tracks. Image librarys (like gd) make drawing the tracks easy, and overlaying just as simple. Getting a library of map images that would allow you to use it for this sort of thing would be the hard part.

tm

Why aren't competitors beating Google to market?

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?

Re:Why aren't competitors beating Google to market

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

What WOULD you call Google's approach?

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.

Where this is going...

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.

Why Safari is NOT supported

It doesn't support iframes and (as the article clearly states) iframes are a big part of how this application works.

I wished I had safari but from what I saw.

The ECMAScript (Javascript) code used for this is pretty standard except for a few else{} to acomodate Internet Explorer (unfortunately you cannot do without). I realize people want things to work in their favorite browser but shouldn't they check that their favorite browser follows standards before blaming Google?

Will this bother some Privacy Fanatics ?

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

John Smith in New York City, NY [google.com]

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

Brandon Petersen

Re:Will this bother some Privacy Fanatics ?

Lord help us if the privacy fanatics ever get their hands on a phonebook and see all the privacy issues there.

JS / HTML graphics: iWon Prize Machine

From TFA [blogspot.com]:

Probably the most striking thing about Google Maps is the very impressive (for DHTML, anyway) graphics. Now, I'm sure that many of you old JavaScript hacks out there have known this sort of thing was possible for a long time, but it's very cool to see it (a) actually being used for something real, and (b) where normal users will see it.

Back in the Summer of 2000 iWon.com [iwon.com] released the Prize Machine [iwon.com].

They didn't want people to need a plugin to use it, so they wrote it in JavaScript.

It's a slot machine with moving prize images. You click the arm and it pulls down and starts spinning. It talks to the server to see if your spin won a prize or not, and spins the wheels accordingly.

Nifty little app, actually.

Google uses XUL

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

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

Re:Quick review

Yuck, just tried map24 for the first time and was not happy with the EXTREME load times. I don't want to sit around while silly java applets load up. Also, it didn't actually pinpoint my home address, just gave me the street. Google maps is better.

Re:When it supports

I did some expert sleuthing, and found that it supports at least four additional regions besides midwest USA. They include:

• Northeast USA
• Southeast USA
• Northwest USA
• Southwest USA
• 
  
  Keep in mind that Southwest USA is where Google is, and I'm sure they have a much easier time getting geographical data. Besides, it would suck if the Google developers did all that work, got the site up, and it couldn't even show them their own offices!

Re:Quick review

I find it difficult to believe anything is better or more accurate. It has my grandfather's indiana driveway in it... I about sprayed mtndew all over my new laptop when I saw that.