kev/null design/book/comics/games/photos/presentations

Yahoo! Maps Launches

In Uncategorized on 2 November 2005. Tagged Man at Work, maps, yahoo!.

As some of you know, I work on the Yahoo! Maps and Local team. Though the things I work on aren’t really in this release, I’m still very proud to point people to the new Yahoo! Maps Beta as well as the kickass mashups at the application gallery.

The first thing you’ll notice is that it’s in Flash which will seem rather controversial. I know when I first saw it I asked a ton of questions:

what about the back button? it works

what about permalink? it auto updates the address bar. heck you don’t even need to click on “permalink” or whatever it is google uses

why not ajax? why ajax? the idea isn’t that ajax itself is better, it’s that rich interaction in browsers is becoming more plausible with more standardized browsers.

what about adoption rate of flash? depends who and what you ask for the stats really. it’s approximately equal to if not greater than for browsers that can support the level of ajax required to do google maps.

There’s a ton of other things I can’t really talk about regarding reasons but you shall see … To be 10000% clear - I’m a designer on the team but I work on other secret stuff. I’m just really happy this is finally out there for my friends to play with.

Also, we DO have an AJAX version for API developers to play with. I personally like the (somewhat buggy) events browser.

Digg this!