Smoothly animated marker.setPosition?

[Zach Cox]

We have some markers on a map.  Sometimes they need to move to a new location.  We move them using marker.setPosition, but this just jumps the marker to the new position, and there is no visual cue that the marker moved.  It just looks like one marker disappeared, and a new marker appeared.

Is there any way to smoothly animate the marker moving from the old position to the new position?  This would provide a much better UX for marker movements.

Thanks,
Zach

[Rossko]

> Is there any way to smoothly animate the marker moving from the old position
> to the new position?  This would provide a much better UX for marker
> movements.

Sure, you'd write some code to animate it. The API allows to you to
develop the features you want, without forcing others to have slow
moves if they don't want them. Basically you'd chop the path between
the old and new sites into small steps and move the marker over each
in turn with a small delay.

You'll have to make some decisions about how to animate ; would you
want each animation to take the same time, regardless of how far it
moves? Or more likely, have the same apparent speed e.g. the number of
animation steps would vary depending on the on-screen distance to
move? Would you want the markers path to be a geodesic or an apparent
straight line? Would you like the icon to be different whilst in
motion to when it arrives?

Here's a demo by 'geocodezip', it uses Directions so you could
simplify it for your use.
http://www.geocodezip.com/v3_animate_marker_directions.html