Day: February 8, 2005

  • Google Maps From Point A to Point B

    I’d like to say this up front: Google Maps is the most beutiful webapp that I have ever seen. It’s thick-client goodness in a plain old browser. It’s gorgeous, it’s clean, it’s interactive, and it’s driven by Google. It also has a killer feature: parmalinkage.

    Getting back on topic, has anyone actually trued to use it? For directions I mean. They seem to be about on par with Mapquest, which isn’t a compliment. I was really bummed when I clicked on the Print button. I was expecting a nice clean overview map with a minimap for each turn. I was dissapointed to find a rather huge map with some text directions thrown in at the bottom.

    Hey guys and gals, what gives? I love that I can click on each turn number and get a zoomed-in map of the turn. They’ve got this retro nostalgic feel to them. I love them. They don’t really do me a lot of good when I’m on the road though, unless I’m balancing a laptop on the dashboard. For the sake of drivers around me, I’ll refrain from that

    I know, I know, it’s a Beta. Unfortunately Google has led me to expect perfection out of their Beta services. I do hope that they give me some options on printing in the future. As much as Mapquest sucks I really like the turn by turn graphics (for when I miss the turn and get lost).

    I could probably deal with the printable directions as they are if they didn’t feel like an afterthought. Mapquest does a pretty good job with their little icons (right, left, interstate, route number, etc). I also like no-nonsense approach that Yahoo Maps takes. They mark their turns with clear L and R icons.

    Thanks Google, for another awesome tool, even if it’s not perfect yet.

  • Open Message Queueing: The Next Big Web Services Thing?

    Slashdot links to an eWeek article detailing the plans of John Davies at JPMorgan Chase & Co to release an open source message queueing system. Amazon already has its Simple Queue Service. Codehaus has its ActiveMQ. There is a lot of room in the marketplace for queues of varying openness and closedness. I’d love to see several queueing systems thrive, especially if they end up being as open as it looks like they may be.