MapQuest Joins the 21st Century With a New Design • Hacker News Board

Re: MapQuest Joins the 21st Century With a New Design

#11

Post by saileshkrish » Thu, Nov 25, 2010, 7:10 AM UTC

Maciek416 wrote: post #5

The "360 view" (like Google's Street View) data for my city (Toronto) is wildly out of date. Across the office where I work there is an entire entertainment center complete with a 50 story condo on top -- which is entirely missing (and still shows a parking lot with cars parked in it) on MapQuest 360. [edit: from the looks of some movie billboards at this intersection and a few other hints, it looks like the data is…

I checked my house and found that the 360 view is about 2.5 years old. I can tell this pretty accurately because of a remodel we were doing at the time.

Re: MapQuest Joins the 21st Century With a New Design

#12

Post by m0th87 » Thu, Nov 25, 2010, 7:11 AM UTC

Surprisingly pleasant. I'm a big fan of the hashmark URL updates. It's a subtle feature but its necessity becomes glaringly obvious when trying to share google maps results.

Re: MapQuest Joins the 21st Century With a New Design

#13

Post by treyp » Thu, Nov 25, 2010, 7:42 AM UTC

m0th87 wrote: post #12

Surprisingly pleasant. I'm a big fan of the hashmark URL updates. It's a subtle feature but its necessity becomes glaringly obvious when trying to share google maps results.

i don't know how long they store those hashmark keys, but i have a feeling that the lengthy google maps URLs would last longer

Re: MapQuest Joins the 21st Century With a New Design

#14

Post by vlad » Thu, Nov 25, 2010, 7:49 AM UTC

Why are the controls on the far right, while the query entry is on the far left?

Re: MapQuest Joins the 21st Century With a New Design

#15

Post by bartl » Thu, Nov 25, 2010, 12:41 PM UTC

mirkules wrote: post #10

I just get a blank, white page. I would expect a 21st century design to perhaps have a fallback in case JS is turned off, or even a simple "please turn on Javascript" message. Edit: Since I'm getting downvoted, I'll say this: I've always maintained that sites need to gracefully handle the absence of javascript. In the past, ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1788856 ), people have correctly pointed out that not al…

I agree with you. I use NoScript, I don't use Javascript on a site I've never visited before. And MapQuest just showed... nothing. As if it was a horrible server error (some PHP sites show a blank page when the PHP goes tits up).

If I wasn't interested to see what they were doing, I would have been gone by now.

This is a horrible introduction to people who accidentally stumble onto the site.

Re: MapQuest Joins the 21st Century With a New Design

#16

Post by wglb » Thu, Nov 25, 2010, 5:41 PM UTC

Looks much nicer, but the satellite view and the 360 view are way out of sync. The 360 view appears to be 3 years older than the view from above.

Without this fixed, it is not going to be much of a challenge to google.

Re: MapQuest Joins the 21st Century With a New Design

#17

Post by owyn » Thu, Nov 25, 2010, 9:14 PM UTC

bartl wrote: post #15

mirkules wrote: post #10

I just get a blank, white page. I would expect a 21st century design to perhaps have a fallback in case JS is turned off, or even a simple "please turn on Javascript" message. Edit: Since I'm getting downvoted, I'll say this: I've always maintained that sites need to gracefully handle the absence of javascript. In the past, ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1788856 ), people have correctly pointed out that not al…

I agree with you. I use NoScript, I don't use Javascript on a site I've never visited before. And MapQuest just showed... nothing. As if it was a horrible server error (some PHP sites show a blank page when the PHP goes tits up). If I wasn't interested to see what they were doing, I would have been gone by now. This is a horrible introduction to people who accidentally stumble onto the site.

No offense, but it's not a demographic worth catering to. It's not a malware site, it's mapquest. Anyone who accidentally stumbles onto the site will have javascript turned on.