Google has announced their Google Maps Beta. Given the cool factor of their other tools I knew this was going to be big. So I tried it out. The sample queries they provide alone make the service much cooler than any of the competition. But I wanted to see what where I live looks via Google Maps. The results: Better start studying something besides cartography.
To start with – the maps are gorgeous. Drop shadows from the location callout, which also has options for setting this as a starting or ending point on a future query. The thumbtack isn’t that intrusive. The vectors are gorgeous – the weighting of the street volumes with colors, the labeling, the chocolate brown borders and the half-circle endpoints. And when you zoom out, the labels disappear cleanly. How am I supposed to compete with that?
The data that google uses appears to come from the same source as yahoo/mapquest (which I don’t like), and it displays it much more attractively. I had always had a preference for MapBlast who was then bought by Microsoft and turned into MapPoint, which I used up until this morning.
Oh – Google maps – since they get their data from the same place, also got the dead ends on my street wrong. Those aren’t through streets. Which is obvious just from the number of delivery-type vehicles that have to back up once they realize it too.
Oh – and it doesn’t work in Safari just yet.
That’s way cool. Looks really good. Like the search feature
yeah it definately looks really nice!
Works on Safari now.