Yahoo! Maps, Your Way
It’s hard to believe it’s only been a week since we released global and satellite data on Yahoo! Maps. Thanks very much to all of you who are trying out the new beta version. We’re definitely listening and taking notes for the future, so please continue to send in or blog your feedback ‘ good, bad and otherwise.
Folks have also noticed our Yahoo! Maps APIs. These are available for you to publish maps on your website, blog or homepage, free of charge. You can have dynamic and interactive Yahoo! Maps running in no time. All of our syndicated APIs offer the following features:
- Fast loading global maps that are draggable, pannable, zoomable and customizable
- 3 map views, Regular, Satellite and a Hybrid mode that blends the two
- Built-in premium geo-coding, enter an address and go
- Customizable overlays, interactive map markers (pushpins) and information windows
- Easy to follow guides and a community dedicated to getting you up and running
Each API also has a bunch of cool features, so prepare to geek out:
- Support for custom overlays at YGeoPoints that move with the map or YCoordPoint coordinates that hover over the map allows you to easily place your own HTML elements on the map
- Extension of our Overlay class including transition states for markers on the map, expand open/close, hide, unhide, change image and smart window border color control to name a few
- Built in ‘add marker by address’ functionality without the need to know your latitude/longitude
- Create custom dynamic maps with XML data in GeoRSS format, we do all the geocoding for you
- Upgraded pan & zoom controls and a new map Navigator widget
- Integrated keyboard shortcuts
- Extended supported events list, enhanced event handling now supports custom context and multiple callbacks registration, as well as YGeoPoint return for click type events
- Enabled by default auto resize with % width/height container size definition
- An advanced built-in logger to help you debug complex Maps implementations
- Improved memory management that is nearly leak-free in all browsers
- Available in 3 flavors: JS, Flash and Flex. Collect them all!
- Easy drop-in code or components
- Most methods including changing location, zoom level, map view type, adding widgets (Navigator, Satellite Control) and panning can be done with just a few lines of code
- Improvements to panning and zooming
- Simple overlays let you add dynamic data, including Live Traffic and Yahoo! Local Search results
Not sure where to start? Give the Simple API a try and see how easy it is to get started. Jeffrey from Yahoo! Developer Network even built a tool that can help you use Excel to build a map.
Whichever API you choose, please know that you will always get the same up to date and reliable service that powers Yahoo! Maps. Just this week, we made some additional data updates and made the maps easier to read when printed.
May all your map apps continue to flourish!
Mirek Grymuza
Chuck Freedman
Vince Maniago
Yahoo! Maps
Something that bothers me a little in the sattelite maps is the “We’re sorry, the data you requested is not available” message. It is good that Yahoo Map supports zoom in/out using scroll wheel but seeing this message after zooming is not so enjoying. Isn’t it possible to either stop the slider from zooming-in more than the available resolution? Or maybe something like streching the current images (to a bad quality image), and somehow showing that this resolution is not available by graying out the images or adding red dots or something like that.
My experience with the present blog handling system has been negative; in particular regarding the favouring frivolous and/or comercial blogs over, for example, encouraging art,poetry and educational items for international consideration. This is done by using negative ‘marking’ by anonimous censors who seem to be alergic for the above mentioned fields.
My proposal is that Yahoo generate its one blogger system following its present open participation policy.