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Wednesday, February 23, 2005 |
Google Maps pushes the envelope.
The instant Google Maps appeared, a lot of us knew right away that we'd never use MapQuest again. Google's mapping and direction-finding service is a stunning improvement. The maps are gorgeously readable, and they fill as much of the screen (or the printed page) as you give them. Scrolling the map works in the most natural way, by dragging the image. The mapping service dovetails with local.google.com, which finds businesses by city or ZIP code. In direction-finding mode, each step along the route offers a link that, when clicked, pops up an enlarged view of the intersection.
What rich and smart client technologies enable this magic? DHTML, JavaScript, CSS, XML, and XSLT. As is the tradition when Google launches a new service, curious hackers immediately took Google Maps apart to see how the magic was done. The best early analysis came from Joel Webber, who worked out the details of image tiling, dynamic updating, and route plotting. Among other interesting discoveries, he found that the application uses the browser's built-in XSLT engine to transform packets of XML received from the server into search results, displayed as HTML.
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The W3C can bless this approach or not, but with Google Suggest and now Google Maps, Google has thrown down the gauntlet. The modern browser is an XML-aware client. Savvy Web developers have known about these features for a while, but now Google has legitimized them and pushed them squarely into the mainstream. My guess is that we'll see an explosion of pent-up creativity as more Web developers discover, and begin to exploit, the full power available to them.
But wait, there's more. If you append the term "output=xml" to any Google Maps URL, the server will send back an XML packet. APIs? We don't need no stinking APIs. In 20 minutes I was able to build a proof-of-concept app -- made from snippets of HTML, JavaScript, and XSLT -- that accepts city names or ZIP codes and displays information about local businesses. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
Events moved a bit too quickly for this column. By the time it hit print, the output=xml party was over, but another one had started as people dug into the JavaScript capabilities exposed by Google Maps. The screencast I made to demonstrate the route animation hack described here has proved so popular that I wish I'd cleaned it up a bit better. If you've watched it, you know that the audio is sketchy. For the record, here's what happened. I recorded the video in Camtasia and then, following the procedure described here, I rerecorded a playback so I could fast-forward and rewind while laying down the audio. All went well until I produced the Flash output. Normally Camtasia's encoder does a great job with screen videos, compressing them down to well under a megabyte a minute. But this four-minute video turned into a 50MB .SWF file! I guess the encoder doesn't do well with the irregularity of maps.
... [Jon's Radio]
2:00:39 PM 
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How to Be an IPod Radio Star. He's gone from MTV to MP3, and now he's leading a grass-roots rebellion called podcasting. Why amateurs may soon rule the airwaves (begin download now). By Annalee Newitz from Wired magazine. [Wired News]
11:57:24 AM
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*Ubuntu: could do with a bit more work*. I'd better start by admitting that I'm a fan of KDE. It's not because it works like Windows, but for the quality of the tools available. However, a GUI is just a way of doing something and I think I've been a bit dismissive of the Gnome desktop up to now. I read a few reviews of Ubuntu, looked at their web site and decided to have a look. I wanted a general purpose (desktop) distribution and an opportunity to get to know the Gnome utilities. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article... [OSNews]
10:52:08 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Patrick Mikulak.
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