Google Maps in Flash

August 23rd, 2005

This site has an implementation of Google Maps in Flash. There’s also a Virtual Earth mode. I have to say that I found it much more impressive than the Javascript Google Map interface. Zooming in feels a lot nicer. You can use your mouse wheel to zoom in and out. You can rotate the map by rotating the compass wheel. You can navigate using keyboard arrow keys, the compass points or by dragging the map with the mouse.

When you zoom in, you don’t get a flash of gray - previously downloaded lower resolution images are shown whilst the higher resolution images are loading. The zoom animation is nice.

This is a lot more impressive than the Javascript version. I showed Google Maps to some people who were not web developers. They really weren’t particularly impressed with Google Maps. World Wind and Google Earth however were much more impressive. Flash can allow this. A lot of people who have been praising Google Maps because they use some cool Javascript technologies. The thing is, end users don’t care how it was built - just how well it works.

Sometimes it’s just easier to make an application in Flash than to write huge complex Javascript scripts and then spend a whole day trying to work out why it doesn’t work in Internet Explorer. I do think that there are good uses of Javascript and XmlHttpRequest but developers need to ensure that they aren’t using the technology simply for the sake of it.

  • Uncategorized
  • Comments(2)
  1. Katrina in Google Maps
  2. Google Maps in ASCII
  3. Great Prank: Scaring people with Flash Fullscreen
  4. The Internet’s Obsession with Google
  5. AFLAX

2 Responses to “Google Maps in Flash”

  1. # Andrei Taraschukon 22 Jun 2006 at 6:38 pm

    Hey, This is Andrei from Advanced Flash Components. I just want to let you guys know that we’ve developed Flash Component that uses Google Maps API. At this point the Google Maps Flash Component is pretty simple, it loads map data and allows to plot points. You can see the example and download a free copy at http://www.afcomponents.com/map_google/.

    Please let me know if you have any ideas or suggestions, I would be happy to hear your feedback.

     

    Cheers, Andrei

  2. # Thomason 19 Jul 2006 at 7:28 am

    Thats a nice thought. Flash can show things very smoothly. But the main problem is still some of the end users doesnt have flash in their browsers. Anyway it is a nice thought and http://www.afcomponents.com/map_google/ had implemented it already…

Trackback URI | Comments RSS

Leave a Reply