Yesterday when I pulled up Google Maps, a site I frequently visit, Ryan looked over and right away noticed that the interface was different. My response was, “it is?” I stared at the sight for a good minute trying to figure out what was different and finally Ryan pointed out the changes. Google did in fact give Maps a makeover, but our guess is that some of you won’t even notice.
Here’s what’s different:
According to the Lat Long Blog, their goal was “less is more” which helps explain why they went from three tabs under the search box displaying “search the map,” “find businesses,” and “get directions,” to no tabs under the search box. Previously they had orange as one of their main colors, now it’s blue.
For those of you looking for where you’d get directions, it’s now moved right below the “Google Maps” logo in the blue bar that runs across the screen. Also keep in mind that you can get directions simply by using the search bar. Just enter: (starting location) to (ending location) in the search bar and Google will return step-by-step directions with an estimated time it will take to get from your starting location to your ending location.
One minor complaint we have with these changes is that if you are planning a vacation and you have multiple points along the trip (also called waypoints), you can’t reorder any of those waypoints. For example, if you decided you wanted to add a stop to your trip, you can add a waypoint, but it automatically puts it at the bottom of your list of stops and there’s no way to move it anywhere in the middle.
Overall, once I noticed the changes I thought they looked nice. They are subtle, so there is a chance that you may not even notice, especially if you don’t use Google Maps regularly.
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Tags: Google, Google, Google Maps
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I totally did the same thing Ashley did. Except I couldn’t find the changes because Google Maps on my computer still looks like the old Google Maps. Are they rolling this out?
You can drag and drop waypoints in the directions panel (minimize the detailed directions first).
We’ve tried everything and we can’t get it to allow us to drop waypoints if there are more than two. We don’t see how you can minimize the detailed directions either…?
What browser are you using, out of curiosity? We are using Firefox 3, so we don’t know if there’s reduced functionality or not.
Knowing Google, they’ll be rolling it out slowly…
@Ashley: Looks like FF2.x supports, while IE6 and FF3.x do not. Anyone can check by pointing to the route and looking for a circle with the tag “Drag to change route”.
We actually determined the anonymous commenter was still viewing the old version of Google Maps, so it’s not a browser issue. Google rolls these features out slowly, so not everybody has them at the same time.