Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

There was some amount of jubilation earlier today on digg when it was revealed that Google Maps lets you zoom in and out using the mouse wheel. "That's pretty neat," I thought. "Though the Yahoo! Maps Beta has let you do something similar since it was first relased," I thought afterwards, but eh, theirs works a bit differently and competition is always good.

What really surprised me, though, was the preponderence of people who seemed to have no idea that we've been implementing at least some version of this concept for a good year or so. So, time for another post about Yahoo! Maps! Interesting features in bold so you don't miss 'em, and of course, here's the Yahoo! Maps Beta link so you can follow along at home.

First off, yup, we support zooming via the mouse wheel. Ours is center-of-map aligned, however, instead of current-mouse-position aligned; it's up to taste which way you prefer.

Okay, now for the new stuff. As you know, you can right-click anywhere on a map and specify that you'd like to get directions "To" or "From" that point. You should also know that we support multi-point routes, meaning you can plot out a single trip with multiple stops without needing to...well, do whatever you would do if you couldn't do that. Print out a bunch of individual point-to-point directions, I guess.

Put those two features together, and you can easily plot out an alternative route (if you don't like the directions we give you) by setting right-click waypoints between your start and end location (see example). It's not exactly intuitive if you're trying to add in waypoints after you've already placed your start and end points, because you can only add waypoints to the top or the bottom of the directions list (by right-clicking "From" or "To" respectively), but...yep, you can drag and drop items in the list to reorder them (drag the flag with the letter on it), so it's not too bad.

Now that you have directions, let's try to make a bit more sense of them. First off, if you mouse over any of the step-by-step directions, the corresponding part of the trip is highlighted on the map. Very useful if you can't see the street names or get a bit lost just looking at the trip (much less driving it). When you mouse over, you also see a little arrow appear on the right, indicating that there's more fun content. Click on the direction and it expands downward, showing a zoomed in view of exactly where on the map that direction starts. Handy.

There's certainly more, but that should be enough for today. Expect a big splash on digg when Google adds these features to its Maps product some time next year. *grin*

EDIT: Oh, it turns out Google Maps already does let you see a zoomed in view for each step of the directions. My mistake, good for them!

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