Blog - MapMyGlobe

I’m happy to introduce MapMyGlobe’s new feature: the ability to animate transitions between frames, i.e. to zoom or unzoom smoothly instead of just switching the viewport to a different location. Right now, this transition is computed from just the frames’ view centers and zoom levels, however, I don’t exclude the possibility of a finer-grained control by the user in the future. Until then, try it out, it’s pretty cool…

Actually, it looks like Google might be willing to roll out a similar user-generated animation feature in their MyMaps app as well. One proof of that being Mark Clark of Google’s London Underground map. He actually uses the same map.panTo() GMaps function that we do.

By the way, it looks like another huge trend might just have emerged at Google Maps/Earth. I’m speaking of the incorporation of imagery from the Southern California fires into Google Earth. As far as I know, it is the first time that Google’s imagery team publishes map tiles relevant to the news, at such a large scale, and as quickly as that. Which makes me think that at some point, any big event visible from the sky will be available on the web almost in real-time…

Today I figured I would write about how I feel about the whole AJAX-y techniques set.

AJAX stuff is great and I use it a lot throughout the application I’m building right now, mapmyglobe.com. A lot has been written about it and I won’t repeat it all. The ability to asynchronously (first A) exchange small pieces of data between client and server without the need for reloading the whole page is great, and so is the seamless integration of XML (X) in lots of scripting languages, calling for spending time on the data processing rather than on the data transport and parsing, and thus providing an abstraction layer for data management (actually in web apps XML is often replaced by smaller-overhead syntaxes like JSON, but the concept is the same). And the whole Javascript (J) function stack provides a powerful framework for client-side, in-browser, interaction and processing.

But what I really feel strongly about, and which does not come to mind first when you talk about AJAX, is the DOM scripting. DOM (Document Object Model) scripting is the ability to dynamically modify the page’s html code, through Javascript functions. As such, DOM scripting is the root of the paradigm shift in web development: from the web being a set of documents being dynamically produced and served to the user, it’s now become a place where you can find real applications that react to the user’s actions, not the browser’s.

My main point is that DOM modification calls for bridging the gap between Flash, desktop widget applications or other multimedia formats that are visually impressive but poor for actual Internet-centered stuff such as user-generated content or search engine integration, and semantic, text-based media that’s great for machine readability but often lack the design assets and appeal. “AJAX”-y javascript effects tend to bridge both worlds and bring together semantic content and animation. We could just integrate user-generated text with fancy javascript effects, but that’s not what I aim at. What I want to do is enable user-generated animation. That’s what’s going to be really innovative. Stay tuned for it.