Google have yet again pulled an amazing piece of work out of their magical hat. Google Maps is the latest project to enter their ‘beta’ program. It manages to dynamically resize your window, scroll with the mouse in real time, zoom in almost real time, search for businesses in the current map area and can be controlled via keyboard shortcuts! Its only the US at the moment but knowing google it won’t stay that way for long. They also manage to cram in route-finding, that will show you the route and give you a list of directions.

Like Google Suggest they do lots of requests in the background to maintain the ‘current page’ for the user. This time its not all with that new fangled XMLHTTP object, they request content in a hidden iframe and then switch it about. Even cooler though is the fact that they actually get back XML data and use a javascript XML object to do the transformation into something readable. It looks like the map segements are all pre-rendered aswell, they seem to want to keep the processing as much client side as possible. Which is extremely sensible for google as I’m sure they have a lot of computing power, but not unlimited.

More reading:

http://libgmail.sourceforge.net/googlemaps.html
http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/02/09.html
http://jgwebber.blogspot.com/2005/02/mapping-google.html

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Great interview with Neal Stephenson over on reason.com: Past, Present, and Future: The author of the widely praised Baroque Cycle on science, markets, and post-9/11 America

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This is very cool. It basically allows you to do slide shows in very simple XHTML and then the system does all the navigation and progress bars and basic layout. Very nice use of the technology. I must remember to try to use it the next time I have to make a presentation.

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One blog that caught my eye as I was browsing the 2005 bloggies entries was SimpleBits. The design is very, very nice. It’s pixelly, very tight and precise and I love the colour scheme. I think I need more icons on the site here, another thing to do when I’m feeling better.

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Some new FireFox extensions that I’ve discovered recently:

• ColorZilla gives you a little dropper in the status bar to quickly get the colour value of any pixel on a page. Great for matching colours or one of those “ooo, thats a nice colour” moments.
• Google PageRank adds the page rank of the current page to your status bar. Handy when you’re optimising pages for search engines.

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I’m ill, been off work since last Friday. Being ill sucks…

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