7/9/05 | 11:50 am | Transparencies for Google Maps
I was clued into a really interesting site by ‘roogler Trecherus yesterday. The site is called Google Maps Transparencies and it provides an overlay functionality that will let you see the center portion of the “street map” google map” as a transparency over the “satellite map”. A great idea, and with Google officially releasing their API for Google Maps we should see a ton more really cool applications like this coming out soon. Keep you ear to the ground…
As you can imagine, transparency is a pretty neat idea and I predict it might be useful for Scavengeroogling as we know it. Because I don’t know about you but I am constantly switching back and forth between the two maps. The move of the Satellite and Map buttons by Google that we mentioned before was interesting but this site actually provides a significant improvement to the switching of maps.
What is very useful is that as you “drag” the map it drags BOTH the overlay and the background map the same “distance”. The overlay stays in the center of the map always. Like Google Maps, you can also zoom into the map (of course if you zoom too far in on a non high-res mapped location it will give the familiar grey screen with “We don’t have the imagery at this zoom level” message.
Also extremely useful is the option to “toggle” the map so that the overlay is using either the Satellite Map or the Street Level Map (and the background is using the opposite). They’ve also put a handy couple of dropdowns to “auto-jump” to various U.S., Canadian and UK cities as well as exact longitude and latitude coordinates.
Beyond it’s applications for Roogling, the transparency feature is interesting for looking at how the various satellite terrain features line up with the street map view. For the most part, Google Maps are pretty accurate on this, though I have seen things that didn’t exist simultaneously in the same map.
I haven’t used this yet in actual application (finding clues) but I figure it should be pretty useful, so you may want to bookmark it for later clue testing. A couple of suggestions I might have for the functionality: It would be cool to have the ability to turn on or off the transparency at will. (I just noticed that there is an “opacity slider” at the bottom that lets you make it completely solid or invisible…very cool). Also, the familiar magnification slider is missing here, although the plus / minus zoom buttons are there. And finally, for roogling it would be nice if the familiar “link to page” actually grabbed the real link instead of a link to this site itself.
