Google Maps

[Mike AkA Don]

http://maps.google.com

Just up today... Very nice

[darrenstraight]

Very nice but its only USA at the moment I guess they will add more later.

[Mike AkA Don]

Yea I scrolled off to the side for a while until I noticed nothing was coming.

Try getting directions with it. Its really cool.

[Justin]

That is pretty cool. Saves me from having to deal with incorrect directions and such, I can trust google. Once I got incorrect directions from mapquest, and ended up 50 miles out of my way. That's annoying...

[geekerati]

Thanks Mike, I was dragging the map everywhere messing around with it, zooming in and out. Instant Mapsco alright,we can print and go! The detail and accuracy is amazing,huh.

[dude66]

cool very nice

[geekerati]

Here is some cool stuff for you code freaks! Mike might enjoy it anyways.

Wednesday, February 9, 2005
How Google Maps works

Joel Webber has blogged an excellent analysis of how the astonishing Google Maps service is accomplished. Great place to start if you're trying to figure out how to build stylish, cross-platform dynamic Web apps:


The top and side bars are (more or less) simply HTML. The center pane with the map, however, is a different beast. First, let's address the map itself. It is broken up into a grid of 128x128 images (basically like an old tile-based scrolling console game). The dragging code is nothing new, but the cool trick here is that each of these images is absolutely positioned -- and the 'infinite' scrolling effect is achieved by picking up tiles that are off-screen on one end and placing them down on the other end. The effect is kind of like laying track for a train by picking up track from behind it.

The push-pins and info-popups are a different matter. Simply placing them is no big trick; an absolutely-positioned transparent GIF does the trick nicely. The shadows, however, are a different matter. They are PNGs with 8-bit alpha channels. Personally, I didn't even realize you could depend upon the browser to render these correctly, but apparently (at least with IE6 and Mozilla), you can. And they actually render pretty quickly.

Boing Boing
Mapping-google blog w/ code

[tokkolo]

I must say I'm impressed. It looks really good. I don't know if it is acurate since I wouldn't know how to find anything in the USA. A shame they don't have Europe, I would be interested in that.

I do wonder how detailed it is (if you look at small towns). I've taken a little tour trough the USA and I saw large big chunks of nothing. Would that be because nobody lives in those area's or has Google only done the larger cities?

[Mike AkA Don]

No most city's are done... Where you looked it might not have roads...

And that code thing I already knew... If you zoom all the way in you'll see that some of the images are broken

[cvrk3]

hello,
thanks for the informative article!