New Yahoo Maps beta
I’ve just played a little bit with the last version of Yahoo Map beta.
First, my comment is that the application is big, in size! It tooks literraly more than 10 minutes at home to download. Yes, I am one of the few without DSL, so I still have to use a modem! The beauty of GoogleMap was his simplicity and the use of standard Web Technologies. I guess that being late in the race, Yahoo had to find something to differenciate…
The application is fancy, but not really innovative. For instance, you have three text string for your request (one for finding place, the others two for directions) while Google had just one box for all of these…
The other strange thing, when you look inside, is that all tiles are predefined Flash elements. But these elements just seems to contains a bitmap..sounds strange (look at http://195.113.150.5/us.tile.maps.yimg.com/tile?md=200511021115&col=1308&row=923&z=5 ).
One the other hand, the AJAX interface seems to work quite well. The good news is that if you use it, all tiles are png images, but with some strange choice: they are 258×258 (256×256 seems much more simpler! 
). But anyway, it should be quite easy to use them in other mapping application, like the good J2MEMAP! 
Technocrati tags: google maps YahooMaps
Add comment November 3rd, 2005
