6/17/05 | 12:10 pm | Magnification Change!
Mark L alerted us to an interesting change in the appearance of the google map: an increase of notches in the magnification slider. I think it JUST happened today, in fact I am sure of it because I happen to have a screenshot that includes the slider from yesterday when I was doing the “dragonfly” clue. As you can see, they seem to have added 3 notches, making it a maximum of 18/18 instead of 15/15 for full zoomed in.
Now, I am not 100% sure but when I did a zoom in of today’s slider to match with yesterday’s it seems as though the relative scale has not changed but for us the numbers will change. That is 13/15 is now 16/18. The slider is still 2 notches from the top, but because we have traditionally counted from the bottom in our game you just need to add 3 to adjust. Note, I am not 100% sure about this, would need to check each clue to compare it.
I am not sure that anyone else except the people who play here may have noticed the increase in notches, and that is only because it is important to the way Scavengeroogle is played…
Even more interesting is, the extra 3 notches added seem to be there to include the rest of the world? So I was thinking, is this a precursor to an inclusion of more high res satellite imagery elsewhere in the world? In fact, is it just my imagination or did they not have “country” names in the street map view before? Interesting… anyone else know if there have been significant changes in Google mapping of the rest of the world. I must admit I haven’t been paying attention because I’ve got my hands full with clue creation.
Also, did they have little “red dots” for major cities before? I think I am losing my mind here…
In any case, I will have to start getting used to 18/18. I guess the other thing we could do is reverse the scale, so that fully zoomed in is 1/18. Ahh… I’m too lazy though, let’s just leave it for now. =)
June 17th, 2005 at 1:25 pm
Also, did they have little “red dots” for major cities before? I think I am losing my mind here…
You’re not losing your mind. They also changed their algorithm for when the city names get shown. Previously my city was labeled on the “nation view” even though it was smaller than some other cities in the state. Now, it’s disappeared because the label for the larger city covers part of the space where the label of my city should be.
In short, I think the old city labeling algorithm was a basic left -> right scan than included cities of a certain size. Start on the left side and plop down labels where the cities are. As you move to the right, keep labeling, but if the label text would overlap with an already existing label, don’t put down the label. This is why my city would get labeled, but the bigger city a couple hundred miles to the east wouldn’t be labeled.
Now they’ve changed it to both do smart positioning of the labels (beside the dot, above the dot, below the dot, etc.) and in the cases of unavoidable overlaps, the larger city is labeled.
By the way, don’t treat any of what I’ve just said as fact. It’s just what I think I have observed …. and it’s evidence that I’ve looked at Google Maps waaaaaaay too much.
June 17th, 2005 at 2:21 pm
Well, your guess about the labeling algorithm seems entirely plausible… I have often wondered how come certain smaller cities would get labeled over much larger ones on some of the citymap views. I think that the new way with the red dot is helpful, I mean just yesterday when I was doing the Des Moines thingy I noticed it kept disappearing depending on the magnification. Today, the city label is always there no matter what the mag, so that’s an improvement.
Also, is it my imagination or do searches on places in Canada actually seem to work better now? I thought I remember having more of a hard time pinpointing Canada locations before…
June 17th, 2005 at 4:56 pm
I’ll tell you one thing that still needs work…labeling of and consistent showing of rivers on the maps…that drove me nuts on today’s clue.
June 17th, 2005 at 5:00 pm
Oh, and I also noticed that they added the equator to the maps.
June 17th, 2005 at 5:24 pm
Jeremy - Boy, do I agree with you on the rivers. Yesterday, trying to come up with a suitable clue for Des Moines, I decided to try to use the Des Moines River, but for the life of me I couldn’t find the name on the river anywhere. Then I looked it up on Wikipedia to try to find the sources of the river where it flows down from Minnesota so I could at least follow it down but I still couldn’t find it! It seems to work OK for lakes, but I was thinking it may be because rivers have tributaries and forks, etc that may often have multiple names depending on your context…
I didn’t notice the equator till you mentioned it…cool.
June 17th, 2005 at 7:37 pm
I wish Google would take www.teraserver.microsoft.com ’s lead and put in topo maps.
June 17th, 2005 at 7:39 pm
woops…… make that www.terraserver.microsoft.com missed an “r”
June 17th, 2005 at 7:52 pm
Also….. if you click on your slider (not moving it up or down) you get this weird “zoom out” “zoom in” thing going on? Or maybe I’m just having a flashback. I think that’s new also.
June 17th, 2005 at 10:22 pm
mark - yeah i used terraserver quite a bit b4 google’s came out. I think that their high resolution can be better as well. I would actually use terra over google for that reason except the interface on google is way better with the real time scrolling etc…
June 18th, 2005 at 7:15 am
I just started playing and just discovered Google maps (I usually use http://mapper.acme.com for geocaching as it has hi-res b/w when color isn’t available AND has pretty decent topo), but even in that short time, I noticed the change in river labeling and the major cities being consistently labeled. Love Scvengeroogle! I’m thoroughly addicted! Thanks for a truly worthy diversion!