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Google Maps Pacman

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Re: Google Maps Pacman

#42

Post by jcl »

vivien wrote: post #5

This is an awesome piece of work. metagame: find the hardest/simplest level on earth :) (I got Manhattan vs Tokyo)

Someone pointed out to me that the Arc de Triomphe is quite fun, with a big enough window size.

Re: Google Maps Pacman

#46

Post by yebyen »

percept wrote: post #26
dheera wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't stand how the whole UI jumps around, rearranges and resizes itself every time I try to do something. Seriously, buttons should stay put.

Agreed, and the search input stealing focus at page load when I'm trying to use the zoom shortcut keys always gets me. (So I see a lot of "===" or "---" in the text field and have to fight it by clicking on the map, usually twice as we face off in a tug-of-war.)

I see this kind of behavior every day in gmail and it drives me batty. I'll use the 'l' shortcut to bring up the label drawer, start typing the name of my label, and three to four characters later gmail is actually ready for me to start typing.

Then I'll backspace out and re-type what I already typed, and Gmail highlights and decides I must want the third entry in the list for some reason, and makes it highlighted. So I'm moving over to the arrow keys.

The same kind of behavior in the search input as you're describing, too. Sometimes I get auto-suggest appearing after only one keystroke, sometimes it takes two. There seems to be no rhyme or reason, other than after a while I can usually somehow predict when my query will begin to be understood by the suggestion engine.

The inconsistency is really jarring, but just below the threshold where I start looking for another service because of how much it annoys me. Sort of like when my external monitor is physically positioned on the left side of my desk, but every time I plug it into the laptop it gets the virtual location off the right side of my screen.

Re: Google Maps Pacman

#47

Post by GauntletWizard »

jeffasinger wrote: post #40
leeoniya wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i can tell you, unambiguously, that it has always been this fast. those tilesets are almost certainly statically cached and served at lightning speed with practically 0 overhead from some regionally located cdn server. server load would have a statistically imperceptible impact here; never seen a google product roll out with scale-related issues, especially one as mature as their gmaps architecture was at the time of…

I think one of the "benefits" of the new version of the maps is that they can more easily customize the output per user. This means that they can show different businesses to you based on your searches, and possibly some day charge businesses to be "put on the map".

Sponsored listings and ads in map search are already a thing on mobile. If I search for certain common terms ("Smog Check", for example), some pinpoints are already highlighted differently because they correspond to ads in the search results list.

Re: Google Maps Pacman

#48

Post by Zirro »

itsbits wrote: post #45
itsbits wrote: post #35

Good but not that useful..

Why not people who are downvoting me just provide uses of it?

Not all things created have to be useful. Some things can be fun. While we humans may not be the most efficient beings imaginable, we do excel in creativity ;)
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