Oh yeah. I remember when Google Maps first came out. Nobody thought that this degree of interactivity was even feasible in a browser. It was really revolutionary.
So no Google Maps for you? I remember mapquest 20 years ago where you'd pan the map by clicking arrows and reloading the page. Good times! Usability totally won that day.
Well, I disagree. The first web client that OSM had been, of course, very different: there wasn't smooth scrolling, etc, which were added after Google Maps did it.
However, a nice and smooth client with drag and zoom was a rather obvious thing to do: a lot of computer games had maps in them as early as in late 1980s, like Sim City and many others, where you could zoom, drag along etc, and it wasn't done in OSM rigth from the start mostly due to pitiful state of web browsers and web standards of the time. So I think that even without Google Maps, OSM would have evolved to have great usability, just as it did in our timeline.
Image maps were the best. We could have a clickable map of the U.S. that was fast-loading, cross-browser compatible, and did not require a plugin. What's not to like?
Today the way to do that is with javascript libraries like D3.js, which handle both drawing the map and detecting/directing clicks. That was not an option 8 years ago; javascript was too slow.
As an avid user of mapquest back in the day, the user experience that google provided (tiled maps that could be panned/zoomed seamlessly) was absolutely revolutionary and the clincher for me.
Mapquest back then had the clunky “click the big arrow” to move the map and reload the page navigation...
Google Maps would be the classic example of client-side refresh working so well that it's now the universal choice. At the time, it was a revelation, as the Mapquest-ish predecessors (if I recall) required a click and server-side refresh to scroll or zoom the map.
Of course the revelation here was that <a> tags weren't what we needed to move a map, but rather a click-and-drag plus scroll-wheel behavior to explore a huge image at various levels of detail. If the server-side page-by-page navigation paradigm is a lousy fit for information delivered over the internet, then it may make sense to re-invent the page load.
To use the language of a sibling comment, this brought things to a much more app-ish behavior. And eventually Internet maps have become, especially on mobile devices, an app. Hence the need to break server-side navigation may have foreshadowed the need to break out of the browser.
Agreed, but I'm thinking this could have been done 15 years ago or more? Google Maps let you scroll around in real time way back when. Not correcting, just sort of asking--I'm way behind on how graphics coprocessors work these days.
I remember when mapping sites worked that way: image in the middle. Want to move it to the right? Click the right arrow button and the page will reload with the map shifted a little.
Compared to Google Maps it was the Stone Age. I get it, a lot of sites use an unnecessary amount of JS and bog down the user. But there are very clear benefits to having JS in browsers.
I remember how impressed I was when Google Maps was released. Instead of having to click on arrows to reload the page with a new map, you could just drag and it would automatically load new map tiles!
Google Earth (the native application) is really old and abandoned by now, but its still better than the new "web" version that only works in Chrome.
There was a way to embed maps in a web page and provide a bunch of points of interest to overlay on the map.
Metricom was using it to provide coverage maps of their pole top box locations, for their spread spectrum wireless mesh radio network (it was rolled out in the Bay Area around 1994-1996 or so).
I remember being impressed by how cool and powerful (and generous) it was for one web site like Xerox PARC's map viewer to provide dynamic map rendering services for other web sites like Ricochet's network coverage map!
Then a decade later, along came Google Maps in 2005.
A particularly innovative use of the map service is the U.S. Gazeteer WWW service created by Brandon Plewe [Plew1]. It integrates an existing Geographic Name Server with the PARC Map Viewer. A user simply enters a search query (e.g. the name of a city, county, lake, state or zip code) and a list of matching places is returned as a formatted HTML document. Selecting from the list generates another HTML document consisting of two maps (small and large scale) with the location highlighted (using the Map Viewer's mark option). The server in New York does not generate or retrieve the map images, since they are references directly to the HTTP server at Xerox PARC. The user's WWW browser retrieves the map images from the server in California and displays the complete document to the user.
/mark=latitude,longitude,mark_type,mark_size
place a mark on the map. ",mark_type" (1..7) and ",mark_size" (in pixels) are optional. multiple marks can be separated by ";" (see example below).
/map/color/mark=37.40,-122.14;21.35,-157.97
Specifies marks for Palo Alto, California and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
If you have a copy of Jakob Neilsen's "Designing Web Usability" to hand there is a detailed critique of the MapQuest user interface of the time. In comparison Google Maps really was a breakthrough in usability.
This is right on the money. People will be blown away by what google maps will look like after enough browsers have WebGL capabilities and the maps team switches to that technology instead of the crude javascript tiling that they rely on right now.
The old mobile maps were frustrating to use. Very data hungry and high latency and with quirky UI bugs. It was very much a translation of the web app meant for desktop use on low latency broadband to a mobile app with only a few tweaks. For example, pinch zooming would work surprisingly, by zooming the low-res tiled image and then effectively translating into a button press to zoom in/out one level, leading to a very frustrating and clunky experience that essentially removed any advantage of using multi-touch gestures over just pressing the zoom in and zoom out buttons.
Google has not only fixed those problems, they've improved the experience several times over. It's fabulous. It's faster, it's responsive, it's seamlessly interactive, it's a pleasure to use.
I used this and it was incredibly slow. Clicking the arrow buttons moved the map by a fixed amount. In my opinion the breakthrough of Google Maps was the Javascript interface that let you slide around and zoom in and out, plus the engineering behind it that served the map tiles quickly.
That's what I remember about it too. It was such a drastic improvement over the old MapQuest site where you'd have to click arrows around the edges of the map and wait for it to load to scroll around the map. I was immediately sold on it (even though I was still just printing out directions to take with me in the car).
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