Rob's Blog

With its clever use of Javascript, Google Maps is extremely useful for finding your way around the USA. This is how Javascript should be used: not to popup windows and animated buttons that serve only to complicate navigation, but to cache map tiles so that the map can be freely sized and scrolled. It certainly beats the annoyance of trying to work out a route to a place that’s right on the edge of the map.

But best feature is the satellite view. This is not only useful for getting an idea of what the area you’re driving to looks like, it’s also endlessly fascinating. It’s quite easy to waste an afternoon looking up the place where you work, the hotel you’re staying in, and anywhere else that might look interesting from space. Other map sites have satellite or aerial views, notably the UK’s Multimap, but Google’s scrollability makes exploring easy. You can find out interesting things, such as that if you live at 10340 Yukon Ave, Inglewood, CA, you’re right in the flightpath of planes landing at LAX!

For more interesting places to look, try The Edge of I-Hacked where you can find, among other things, a Saturn V rocket on its side, or this list of places on Perljam.net which links to an image of Magic Mountain, a theme park with many scary rides that I visited last weekend (the rides don’t look so scary from this angle, but they are).

Google Maps now also covers the UK, which is handy, but the satellite view does not yet zoom in very far. I look forward being able to view the entire world at such high resolution.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 2nd, 2005 at 6:37 am and is filed under Links. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.