Sharing In.Maps
| Friday, July 6th, 2007 | --Sean |
For a little while, we've had a cool parallel mapping project going on in the form of the Yahoo! India Maps. Once you get past the slightly sluggish tile loading (because those bytes are traveling across an entire ocean! Or maybe a few continents, whatever), they're really fun to play with, especially because they're always testing out nifty new features.
The one that caught my eye recently is the Share button, located at the upper left of the map. When you click on it, it pops a bounding box into the page that you can move around and resize. Once you've framed an area of the map that you like, you can either download that section as an image or get code (or a URL) for showing it directly from our servers, as you can see below. This seems like a really handy tool if you need to spice up the location information for your place of business on your webpage or if you just like to save pictures of things to your hard drive. And if they could make this ridiculously intuitive interface generate code that shows a dynamic Javascript map instead of just an image...oooh, it gives me chills. Nice job, India Maps team!
July 6th, 2007 at 10:32 pm
A far cry from Google Maps India, which has you guys soundly beat, as usual.
July 7th, 2007 at 12:35 pm
Thanks for the observation! :) I won’t dispute that Google has much better coverage and satellite imagery in India, and kudos to them for that. The main thing that I was pointing out, however, was the implementation of our Share feature, which is a fun innovation regardless of what Google is doing.
July 7th, 2007 at 10:20 pm
Also, if you’re actually connecting from India, this service is far faster than the default Yahoo! Maps, and there’s no flash involved either.