Google Maps is awesome. I’ve been playing around with it and exploring various areas. I followed the 10 freeway from Santa Monica to it’s ending point in Jacksonville on the east coast of Florida. I never knew the streets in the Park La Brea apartment community had such an interesting layout (search for “park la brea 90036″; what you’re actually searching for and will find are shops with “park la brea” in their names and the map will show all of the matching stores on the map with pushpins). I like how the map images are anti-aliased; that was on my suggestion list for MapQuest and Yahoo Maps for years. Well, it seems like MapQuest anti-aliases the lines on their images now, whereas Yahoo Maps does not. Compare the image quality of this (Yahoo) with that of this. You’ll note that MapQuest is much cleaner and smoother. However, Yahoo has a Javascript-based pan function whereas MapQuest does not. In Yahoo when you click on an arrow to pan the map image in any direction, only the image reloads, which is quick. In Mapquest the whole page reloads when you pan in one direction, which is not only slow but also means that your scrollbar positions in the Web browser get reset, because as far as the browser is concerned you just went to a new page (since the view is controlled by the Query String portion of the URL). And likely you’ve scrolled down to see the map, since there’s a lot of heading information on the page, and so each time you pan you’ll have to scroll back down to center the map in your window again. Google Maps has the best of both worlds, though, with a heavily Javascripted interface (like Gmail) and a nice anti-aliased display. Try panning on Google’s map by dragging… isn’t that amazing? The map itself is composed of a bunch of tiles, and so when you drag it to expose new areas only the tiles required to fill in those areas are downloaded. It also seems that the page must load tiles around the edges of the map that aren’t viewable, so when you start panning in any direction those already-cached images are shown immediately, while the browser gets to work loading the next set of images that haven’t yet hit the screen. I don’t know how this program will work for someone over a modem link, though… the fundamental speed limitations of dial-up connections much be too much for a program like this to run at a decent speed. But then again, who has dial-up anymore? I hope that’s going the way of 256-color displays (and the whole concept of “web-safe colors”). Actually dial-up is a ubiquitous fallback, since one can always find phone lines, say in hotel rooms or when a guest at someone else’s house far away from the comforts of home, when an emergency Internet connection is needed for a laptop computer, for example. But then, something we’re probably going to see soon is wide-area wifi coverage which will initially only be available in select cities, but the popularity will grow. Eventually, we’ll take the ability to get online anywhere over the airwaves for granted just like we take AM and FM radio stations for granted. That’ll put cell phone carriers out of business, though, since if the Internet is available freely anywhere, someone will start mass producing “cell”-phones which just use voice-over-IP to communicate. Actually that concept exists already, for when you want to talk for free in a coffee shop or some other place where there’s unmetered wifi available; it’s called “voice-over-IP-over-wifi”. But the places where you can find a wireless hotspot that lets you connect are pretty limited. The coffee-shop wifi links which are consistently available make you pay quite a bit to gain access, though I think the services are overpriced because the equipment necessary to set up a hotspot is very limited. Basically all you need is a broadband wired link (DSL or Cable) and a solid wireless router. I bought an 802.11b (slower speed than the current latest standard, 802.11g, but plenty fast for Internet access since it’s faster than most servers’ links) for $10 at Best Buy (with a rebate) and it works great, though the commercial services probably want something a great deal more solidly built and with greater range. Still, it’s a one-time expense. And the DSL or Cable link (or both for reliability) wouldn’t cost much, in the general scheme of things, either. Unless they’re going for a T1 line, but I don’t see why that’s necessary. Starbucks locations (Starbuckses, preciousss!) general have a hotspot provided by T-Mobile whereas Coffee Bean locations uses a somewhat cheaper service called FreedomLink which apparently is provided by SBC. (As an aside, I dislike SBC. Their DSL connections are horrible to troubleshoot because they use PPPoE (PPP over Ethernet) which adds a completely unnecessary and pointless level of complexity and authentication to the connection. If you have the choice between SBC DSL or someone else’s Cable, the latter’s probably the better choice.) Anyway, Google Maps is to the other online map services as Gmail is to the other big webmail services. And no double some people will find it a huge revision of the status quo in how mapping and driving direction sites are done, while others won’t like it. It’s the same with Gmail… I have friends who, for whatever reasons, don’t like it much and just want to continue using Hotmail. Part of it is, I’m sure, that changing an address is extra work because you have to e-mail everyone and let them know, and check the old address often, and so on. I didn’t have to deal with that since I just set me old addresses to forward to Gmail… if you have a Hotmail account you probably have to pay them for that ability, and I know I’d have to pay to do that with my Yahoo account. But that’s okay; “mjhecht@yahoo.com” is for setting up accounts or buying things online and the receipt of junk mail; their spam filter is pretty good and real people I know who want to e-mail me things don’t even know about that address. So I check it every once in a while… and since it gets, maybe, a hundred junk messages per days, I don’t care about posting the address here where it can be parsed by address harvesters crawling the web for addresses. (I wonder how “smart” those crawlers are… do they look for text like “mjhecht AT yahoo DOT com” which people spell out all the time to obfuscate an address when posting it on the Web and supposedly protect it from harvesting? I always assumed they did, or at least some did, and so I used a more advanced obfuscation scheme. More on that another time… I think I’m up to about three levels on the tangent stack at the moment. Or maybe just one level.) Anyway, in conclusion (which is the same as my introduction): check out Google Maps. And don’t worry too much about staying dry, a little water won’t hurt you, we’re waterproof.