Point of No Returns
| Friday, May 25th, 2007 | --Sean |
I feel like I always cover really minor cool features, but, I dunno, these are the things that I find interesting. For instance, over the weekend I got annoyed about how addresses online are still printed on multiple lines, which doesn't seem to fit into the online mapping address box paradigm. But then I find out today that the address boxes in Yahoo! Maps automatically strip out the newlines when you paste in a multi-line address. Which, to me, is just really darn cool. Try it out yourself on this sample -- and newly convenient -- address!
1026 Alma St
Menlo Park, CA 94025
Alternate title for this post: "Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Key Here"
EDIT: This isn't at all Yahoo! related, but it is really useful -- there's a Firefox configuration setting that you can tweak to make ALL text boxes accept multi-line inputs (and automatically strip out the new lines). See this Lifehacker tip.
May 26th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
thanks, i cant tell the hours n places i’ve been too with that map.
May 26th, 2007 at 10:42 pm
“Minor cool features?”
That’s code for “insanely useful stuff”, right?
May 26th, 2007 at 11:54 pm
Well, you know, it’s no MyBlogLog tagging. :P
May 29th, 2007 at 11:00 am
Of course, in all their cleverness to make the pasting smarter, they disabled Ctrl-C to copy addresses from the box. You have to right click to get to the copy command. Whoopsy.
May 29th, 2007 at 11:58 am
Did they? Copying from any of the text boxes seems to work fine for me (as well as from the textual descriptions in the search results, though that’s more amusing because the item tries to drag along with your cursor as you highlight the text). That’s with Firefox in Windows, Flash Player 9.
May 29th, 2007 at 12:53 pm
Interesting. Perusing the bug list for maps, there do indeed seem to be a number of reports of this. Unfortunately, it’s not something that’s turning out to be very easy to chase down. Platform specifics are a really big help here: (e.g. browser (with version), OS (with version), extensions and plugins (with versions) would be tremendously helpful in aiding debugging.
Likewise, you can try using the Customer Care form which captures some of that information for you (and yes, people really do look at those, it’s just that there are a LOT of folks sending in stuff like “Where are my keys?” Or “How do I find the USA?” that the customer care folks have to get through.)
May 30th, 2007 at 7:20 am
Sounds great. You know, it would be nice if there was a link to the “customer care form” on the maps.y.c page. THe help menu links to http://help.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/maps/cgi_betafeedback but that’s not the same thing. A sort of “help us correct errors” kind of link, very obvious.