Gadgetory

is dieter bone with a virgin we're here at Google i/o taking a look at the new maps it's completely redone it goes full screen and it's all written in this WebGL technology which means that it's a super fast and can feel like a native app and they're using vectors instead of tiles but all that nerdery aside what's really amazing here is they've done a really good job with just making the map look cleaner they switch to a Roboto font and they've added you know all these little icons and interesting things happen when you tap on them so I tapped on this one the roads I might actually want to use stay highlighted and everything else kind of gets dimmed out because I'm probably not going to want to go on those routes you can see also when I tapped on it there's an information card here that lets us to jump right into Street View there's a cool little zoom in animation there and we can look around in Street View we can hop back out a street view look at photos you can you got photos inside the thing and of course you can get directions so if we tend tap on get directions we can say we want to get there from say San Jose just like that and it not only gives us our driving directions but it also shows right next to it transit directions so you can choose which way you want to do it and if you do something crazy like if we go from San Jose to say Los Angeles it will also give you driving directions but it'll also show you that flying is faster than driving maybe you want to do that which is pretty slick and there's also some actually super cool transit directions here so say we want to get to the Randall Museum and say we want to get there from this fake home that we've got here which is Mountain View and say we select the transit information you can see that they've simplified how it displays the transit information so you can see it leaves every 60 minutes instead of having only getting what the next trains going to be and then you can click on the departure to open up this really detailed view that shows you all the different routes how often you have to walk when you have to change trains and you can just you know scroll through to see a bunch of them and then they've give you the full excellent of how the transit stuff works at the bottom the other thing that's incredibly cool with this is they have integrated Google Earth completely so in addition to your more traditional satellite view or you can go in once you zoom in close enough you kind of switch over to a classic Google Earth move so it's very fast it feels very fluid and they've out they've just added a whole lot of nice features to make the map more usable but also some whiz-bang features we're now looking at the planet these clouds that are on the planet are rendered in real time this is what the clouds actually look like on the earth right now and if we zoom out a little bit further we can see the stars in the background those stars are in their accurate position as is the Sun which is pretty cool all this is done directly in the web browser no third-party apps to add on it's going to be compatible with Chrome Safari with I think you need to get WebGL support and it should be available in Firefox as well with IE 11 coming soon so if you want to try the new maps on desktop you just need to go to maps.google.com slash preview and punch in your email address to sign up it's still a preview it's not even really a beta product yet so there's gonna be bugs and Google is looking for your feedback but it's definitely worth checking out because it's pretty cool