6/30/05 | 10:26 am | Map & Satellite Button Change
I noticed another minor change to the googlemap look today. They’ve moved the “Map” and “Satellite” buttons, which used to be plain old links on the right hand side of the page, into the actual googlemap itself. They are positioned so they float on top of the image like the magnification slider does.
This actually seems pretty helpful for Scavengeroogling because I don’t know about you but I am constantly switching back and forth between the satellite and map views. Before you had to go to the right side to get it to switch, but now it’s right there within the picture which is sort of nice. Although… it is not TOO far in distance from where it originally was. Hm.. maybe the whole idea was to just get the actual buttons into the map.
But I can’t imagine that this is anything but a usability change. I don’t think it is a pre-cursor to a new feature introduction. In any case, lots of changes in the past two days. I think I read some news the other day that Yahoo is looking to upgrade their online mapping technologies someday, so maybe Google is changing things in anticipation of competition? Who knows…
