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April 19, 2005

| Above and Beyond the Call of Game Development Duty >>

Holovaty Strikes Again

When I’m bored at night, I watch downloaded episodes of Battlestar Galactica.

When Adrian is bored, he augments Google Maps with local public transit routes.

I don’t live in Chicago, obviously, but come on. I had to to install this thing, just to see it. And whoah dude: It’s really cool. The magical thing is that Adrian has just seamlessly inserted new stuff into the Google Maps interface — no muss, no fuss, no other site.

A comment on Adrian’s post led me to this full-on toolset for Google Maps hackery. Awesome.

I see a vision of a Flickr-enhanced Google Maps dancing before me… just out of reach…

Posted April 19, 2005 at 5:59 | Comments (6) | Permasnark
File under: Technosnark

Comments

Part of what's significant about this is the engine that makes Adrian's wizardry possible: the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox. The Greasemonkey script repository is like the Firefox Extension room on steroids. Currently, my installed GM userscripts ...

Automatically load up single-page view on NYTimes.com articles.
Give me an automatic Salon daypass to view premium content.
Display a tiny Flash mp3 player to play any .mp3 link on a site, instead of having to download it and boot up WinAmp, or whatever. Note: This one is clearly the coolest ever.

I love people. They are geniuses.

Posted by: Matt on April 19, 2005 at 06:33 PM

chicago map thing - cool.
nytimes thing - neat, useful.
salon - useful.
inline MP3 Player - holy crap, this is awesome.

also cool: google maps scroll wheel enabler thingy.

Posted by: kevin. on April 19, 2005 at 11:29 PM

Seems to me that this could be super cool as a way to advertise businesses, parks, people, etc. You could have your logo pop on the google map when somebody types in your business address. Or, simply a snapshot of your house so that when somebody is coming over, they'll know what your house looks like. You know how directions to a friend's house are always like, "It's the blue one with the fence on the left...".

Or, do I totally misunderstand the gmap hack?

Posted by: Aaron on April 20, 2005 at 02:47 PM

No, in fact you're totally on it: In a few of the hacks I've seen on the web, people are inserting their own HTML -- including images -- into those pop-up balloons. You could do exactly what you describe.

Maybe somebody needs to invent some sort of quasi-standard metadata format for people to specify custom HTML displays for their addresses? So if you look up my apt. in San Francisco you see my parking tips, or a picture of my front door. Man, that would be TIGHT!

Posted by: Robin on April 20, 2005 at 03:45 PM

Yay! Now there's a Holovaty map for Boston. Well, parts of it anyway.

Posted by: Matt on April 20, 2005 at 08:54 PM

Google Maps on TiVo

Posted by: Matt on April 21, 2005 at 11:41 AM