With all the buzz these days surrounding the release of the Yahoo! Maps beta, it seems like there's a new example popping up on every other blog. Everybody seems to be talking about how easy it was, so I had to find out for myself. I must say it was almost too easy. Yahoo! has made this extremely easy to get a map up and running in no time at all. So to honor the completion of my chopper I just finished (just in time to completely miss all of the Texas riding season ), I decided to map some of the shops I gathered inspiration and/or parts from during the 2 year build of the bike. Granted, my example is not all that customized, but was still far more easy than I expected. In fact I spent the batter part of this 45 minute project jacking with the Combo box and the background image, as I was connected and pulling a map from Yahoo! in minutes.

I haven't played with the zoom widget, or skinning of the map itself (although I hope to free some more time up to tweak ), the fla examples Yahoo! provides were the most helpful. My only gripe is that I think I may be a bit spoiled by the API documentation provided by Laco for his tweening classes, or the code examples provided Geoff Stearns for using his FlashObject; I'd like to see more code examples in the actual Reference Manual for the Yahoo! Maps Flash APIs. However to be fair, this gripe probably has more to do with my lack of programming prowess than any deficiencies in Yahoos documentation.

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********* UPDATE 11.24.05 **********
Okay so while I waiting for the Turkey dinner to settle, I decided to play around with my map a bit more. I was able to get the Pan and Navigator widget implemented. I also tooled around and rotated, moved, and styled (to a small degree) the navigator widget. There is actually quite a bit of tweaking that can be done to this UI, however it took a lot of for loops, trace actions, and experimenting to track down most of it. Hopefully after this app comes out of Beta the API documentation will be enhanced as well. I think once that happens we'll see a lot more customized usage of this cool tool!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 23rd, 2005 at 12:29 pm and is filed under Flash, Motorcycles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.