From here to there: Favorite online map service?
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Tom Reingold
drag a map across the screen. I can't even remember the features I take
for granted, because there are so many.
Of course, all of these sites sometimes recommend really wacky routes.
Some are even wrong. So I still check mapquest.com and mapsonus.com and
compare routes. Sometimes I check the msn site, whose name I have
forgotten, but it's easy to find.
Tom
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> Of course, all of these sites sometimes recommend really wacky routes.
> Some are even wrong. So I still check mapquest.com and mapsonus.com and
> compare routes.
Way wacky. I plotted a map on Google from here to a suburb of
Baltimore, and the route to 95 was bizarrely fucked up. Had me going
north on 78 or something, then making some weird loop through the
suburbs. Good thing the error was in a part of the route I didn't
really need help with.
Plus, it sort of paid off. The reason we were going down to B'more was
to pick up a dog we were adopting from a rescue in North Carolina. The
rescue people were meeting us sort of half way and we had to coordinate
arrival times. Because I had only glanced cursorily at the Google
route, I didn't notice the circuitous thing until later, and in the
meantime I gave the people we were meeting Goolge's time estimate,
which turned out on account of the route bizarreness to be a good 30
minutes longer than in real life.
So basically, it meant we didn't have to rush getting out of the
house...
Totally agree on the importance of backup and am glad to learn of the
existence of Mapsonus.com. Will have to check it out... (but I do like
that satellite image on Google, yes I do).
Tom Reingold
where I worked. Those guys used to be my users, if you'll pardon the
term. It used to have four options for routing, and I liked to try all
of them: shortest, fastest, avoid major highways, favor major highways.
Shortest would make tons of turns just to save a foot here or there.
But it was useful to take that and smooth it out a bit using a map. It
would alert me to possibilities I never considered. And it was good for
planning a bicycle route. Same for "avoid major highways" since it's
illegal or unpleasant or both to cycle on major highways.
Sometimes the wacky routes are actually good. And sometimes they're
not.
I do like these web sites but I still like maps, too.
I have a company-supplied blackberry and I installed a google maps
application on it. I can do route queries and get maps right on the
device. Of course, the display is small and the details are rough, to
make them fit. But it could be useful.
I feel mixed about navigation systems. They're wonderful, and I look
forward to when they're affordable for everyone. But it will whittle
away our skills for old fashioned navigation with maps and our brains.
Tom
rem...@gmail.com
and political boundries are not shown.
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On Oct 20, 1:05 am, rem...@gmail.com wrote:
> Google maps is my default, but you can only plot two points at a time
> and political boundries are not shown.
That's true, but...how often do you need those functions?
I guess it would be better if one had some idea of what towns one was
travelling through.
Tom, I doubt navigation systems will whittle down old-fashioned map
navigation skills. Because I'm not sure most people have any.
Okay, that was a slight rhetorical excess. But I do think the
popularity of nav systems might have something to do with the fact that
they fill a deficit...
Rastro
Microsoft's mapping site. I like that I can get arial views and I like
the oblique angle view. Not sure what it's actually called. I know I
can do it using Google Earth, but I don't think Google Maps can do it
directly.
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knew about before now.