You’ll never use MapQuest again. With a new addition to its Google Maps service, Google has completely reinvented the notion of online driving directions, letting you adjust routes in with a simple drag and drop.In the past, when you asked services like MapQuest or Google Maps for driving directions, you took what they gave you. Now, thanks to Google’s latest brainstorm, you can customize your directions on the fly. If you’re dead-set on avoiding a particularly-congested part of town, for instance, you can drag your driving route a little this way or that – and Google will automatically change the turn-by-turn directions.”Can you imagine going back to clicking arrows and waiting for the screen to refresh just to move the map left/right/up/down? It’d be as big a bummer as going back to 8-track tapes,” wrote software engineers Ryan Sturgell and Barry Brumitt on the official Google Earth and Google Maps blog. “Today, we’re taking another big step forward with driving directions in Google Maps.”
It’s hard not to agree with them. The new tools also give you the power to change a route’s beginning and end points via drag and drop. And whatever part of a route you’re dragging to and fro, a floating ticker updates the total distance and duration of your trip – in real-time.
How do they do it? Google product manager Jessica Lee attributes the speed of these tools to the company’s server infrastructure. “We’ve had our engineers specifically working on our driving direction servers to make them extremely fast,” she told The Register. “That’s what allows us to do real-time re-routing.” Naturally, the new drag-and-drop interface was coded with AJAX.
[via The Register]
I noticed the new dragging ability earlier this week and have been loving it. The only negative I had was trying to drag to a point off screen… but you can drop and then grab the newly made point and readjust. Its made it a lot nicer to make custom maps on how to get places. Below you’ll find a video touting the new addition and explaining it power. But seriously, you’ve got to try it to believe it. Plan out that trip to Santa Cruz (make sure to note California) and drag out a stop at the A’s stadium. Another nice thing was the ability to tweak starting points… after all I know how to get out of town, now you can just drag the point to somewhere on the highway. Considering that I had recently tried Yahoo maps to do something, I’m glad that I stuck with Google Maps… this came out at a good time.
Tags: Google, Interesting, Internet, Maps
