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Skinnable Yahoo Maps: Nice!
Posted
November 8, 2005 
Comments(5)
Comments(5)
Justin Everett-Church has created a way to change the look and feel of Yahoo! Maps, creating a pirate map and a radar map as examples.
I wasn’t crazy about the use of flash for the new Yahoo! Maps, but I had no idea you could do this sort of thing. I’m very impressed.
Another data point on the importance of APIs. You set the APIs loose, people will figure out neat things to do with it.
Via McManus.
I’m trying not to be a curmudgeon about the new Yahoo! Maps, but it keeps irking me. Each time I go back to give it another chance, I run into some new pain:
1. Flash. My flashblocker, which you’ll have to pry out of my cold dead hands, makes flash-heavy interfaces stand out, and not in a good way. That’s not sufficient for anyone else, but it’s strike 1 in my book because it means that every site with an embedded Yahoo map will now have that map blocked unless I indicate otherwise.
2. Jerky zoom effect thing. When I’m switching views, the map data itself changes. It’s supposed to. For instance, going from the city level to the street level makes city names disappear and streets appear. That’s perfectly OK, but it means there’s no reason to try “smoothing” the transition from one view to the other. It’s just wasting my time and showing me how blocky the previous view really was. I also can’t help but think this was the “killer interface” reason for using Flash.
3. Can’t print. Printing the “printable view” results in a blank page. Even if I could, he “printable view” isn’t the same as the view I came from. Probably just a bug, but printing a map is absolutely essential functionality. I can’t help but think this is also due to Flash. See item 1.
4. Flash 8. This is just for the pirate map thing, but once again we get into relying on specific plug-in versions for feature support. Without 8, the pirate map was just a regular map with a funky border and no controls at all.
Anyway, I wish I could be more impressed by this. Or perhaps I just need another cup of tea.
Chris, which third-party blocker do you use? Flashblock is pretty simple to “click to load”, but others may not be…?
When scaling map data, interpolation is one tack, and has the advantage of retaining visual context but Google’s “let’s go blank” is another approach, agreed.
You should be able to print. Variables includes (a) using the browser app’s printer or using the plugin’s own printing (not all browsers print plugin content identically); and (b) what exactly is being printed (sounds like the app you’re looking at has a button, but I don’t know its implementation — basically, in Flash you can print anything you wish, not just the current screen).
Justin’s pirate example used some of the realtime pixel-filtering in Macromedia Flash Player 8, but that’s not a necessary feature for mapping, just a nice indication of the tools you have available to you now.
These tricks don’t strike me as very useful. I haven’t checked the API, but it is that shallow, then why bother? Windows 3.1 allowed me to change the desktop colors and give it a Pirate theme as well.
Flash is very iffy as a technological choice. I hope there was a big internal debate… Flash is so… nineties…
John: I use Flashblock, yes. I can definitely click on the “Flash lurks here” button and start it up, but the point is that I can’t tell between a perfectly-valid Yahoo Map and an (increasingly-common) advertisement designed to slam my eyeballs back into my head.
Yes, I should be able to print. However, this particular app (Yahoo! Maps Beta) has a “printable version” button that a) produces a different map view than the one I was just looking at and b) doesn’t actually print the map. Why use the “printable version” link? If I just print as-is, I get a lovely message: “Attention Firefox User: Yahoo! Maps Beta has a known bug when printing directly from the browser. Please use the Printable Version link within the application for a working print solution. Thank you for your understanding.”
Indeed.
For the flip side of this, I’ll post my positive Flash comments in Parand’s next post…
Whoops, one more comment on Flashblock. I’m less concerned with the maps on the Yahoo! sites themselves, and more concerned with folks who would include them on their own sites, a la Google Maps. It’s in those cases that I’ll have a hard time determining the difference between a functional component and an advertisement.