Google Maps Bookmarklets
Since the recent release of Google Maps in the UK, I’ve been having a play around to see what can be done.
I’ve always been a big fan of MultiMap, but I think with the expertise (not to mention money) of Google now competing against them, I think they’re going to find the mapping market a lot more crowded.
I’ve put together a couple of very simple bookmarklets to query Google maps: the first simply gives the map of a location based on the input (it probably works best with post codes, but you can try town names too).
The second uses Google’s direction finder to show a possible route between 2 locations. Again, entering post codes is probably the best way to do it, but I also noticed in testing that town names, or road names plus a town name may work too (actually, in one of my first tests I accidentally created ‘null’ as an input value, which was translated into Null Road in East Yorkshire; I suspect from the location of the road that it should actually be Hull Road, but I digress).
I wouldn’t know whether the routes chosen are the quickest, best, most scenic etc. – for that sort of information you’ll have to ask my dad ;)
You can try these bookmarklets out by clicking the links, and if you want to keep them for later use, drag the links into your favourites/bookmarks.
There’s a few more ideas I’ve had that could be possible with both Google Maps and bookmarklets (with a bit of geo-tagging thrown in). I’ll post them up here when I’ve had chance to think them through and try a few things out, that’s if no-one has beat me to it in the meantime.
<form action="http://maps.google.co.uk/maps" method="get"><label for="saddr">Your postcode</label><input type="text" name="saddr" id="saddr" value="" />;<input type="submit" value="Go" /><input type="hidden" name="daddr" value="[destination]" /><input type="hidden" name="hl" value="en" /><form>
Thanks for that… code nice and simple – I expect Null Road will be getting a lot of traffic