i keep saying "whoa."

Google Maps -- making driving directions actually fun. 

(Just wait until they enable an overlay of satellite imagery from Keyhole with one click.  Then someone will write a bookmarklet-y thing to transition from a zoomed-in Google map to an Amazon street-level photoset.  And then we'll never have to leave the house -- we'll just buy huge monitors and pretend we can fly around the country like Chris Reeves did in Superman.)

Comments

[McGroarty]

The map is served up as a bunch of static tiles so your browser and proxies in-between can cache 'em. Compare to the other map servers rendering a map per view. How cool is that?

If you map a route, the route is also rendered as a transparent PNG atop the normal map. That's got to be loads quicker to generate than re-rendering the map or loading in the tiles and plotting on top. Bet it comes from different servers as well.

Try resizing your browser once a map's up. It will reposition the tiles to smoothly recenter, and it will load additional tiles as needed to present a larger map. Slick! Google Maps officially joins the lonely ranks of GMail and Prime Number Pooping Bear as worthy Javascript apps.

And the balloon shadows are cuuuuuute. That makes it an A+ instead of an A.

[Robb Beal]

If you make that trip, be in touch!

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=clayton%20mo%20to%20creve%20coeur%20mo

[Michael]

Just noting that they added satellite imagery yesterday. Time to don the Superman outfit.