Perspectives

“The print page is dead”. Put your hands together for in-context printing.
Yahoo! India Maps print page just became better, faster and a lot cleaner. Fancy this, you are new to Bangalore and are staying with a friend in Indiranagar. You have heard much about the new Lido Mall, and the Fabulous seating at the Fame Cinemas Multiplex. You are in a hurry to catch the movie. Now visit Yahoo! India Maps at http://in.maps.yahoo.com, search for “100 feet
road indiranagar to lido mall” and click on the “print” link in the left hand corner.

A helpful pop up shows that your print will need 2 sheets. Now, click on Print and you are all set to enjoy pop corn at the movie. The Map is also in wide screen (landscape), so what you see is indeed what gets printed. The Printout also gives useful tips on the distance, approximate time taken and local auto rickshaw fare, all of which will aid you in making sure you pay only what you need to pay to that friendly Auto driver

Just that Simple

Subramanyan Murali
Yahoo! Maps Engineer

Just showing off a bit because The Hindu still remains my favorite newspaper.

I haven’t seen this on TV myself. A bunch of my friends say they saw in on Sony TV.

Did you see it sometime? Do you like it?

Here in India, we speak several hundred languages amongst the billion of us. Even the Government officially recognizes 23 of them. No single person can possibly learn all Indian Languages in his lifetime and so, most of us make do with a few. Yahoo! India Maps ( http://in.maps.yahoo.com ) is no exception. After sitting through a lot of language courses, Yahoo! India Maps has now learnt to speak nine languages (Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi, Gujarati, Oriya, Kannada & Malayalam) apart from English. Watch out for the “Vernacular” button along with “Map”, “Satellite” and “Hybrid” buttons to see an area in it’s primary language. We have covered the major cities and towns and will expand the “Language Map view” to other regions in the time to come.

Personally, Maps in vernacular languages is magical for me. Because for once, my Grand-moms and Grand-dads will get to see and understand what I do all day long sitting at Yahoo!.

We have also released “Walking directions” along with this push. If you are the one who walks, You could simply type a query like “Walk from Yahoo! egl bangalore to Yahoo! MG road, bangalore”. Alternatively, You could also choose the “Walk this Route” link on the right pane when you have driving directions.

Yahoo! India Next, which is an Indian clone of Yahoo! Next was launched a little while ago. Yahoo! India Next will talk about innovations and cutting edge technology that gets built in Yahoo! Bangalore for India.

I was asked to write about “Landmark based driving directions” that we launched in a India sometime ago. And I did. You can read about it here.

I also made this little banner for the blogpost.

I made an ad-hoc small “Yahoo! India Maps, Try it!” kinda badge which you can see on the right pane.

What do you guys think?

And you wont even notice it. Well, I guess, that was the idea. It is magical how they all have managed to pull this one through. I mean, everything that worked in Flex works exactly the same way in JS? Makes us wanna think, that they initially used flash for the wrong thing, or they had other feature rich ideas initially which they never managed to roll out.

But, I think this is a good way forward. It takes a lot less time to load for sure. ( Still not very ideal, takes about 8 Secs from a good broadband in India). It will begin to work on those Airport Computers that dont have flash installed. The Yahoo Maps Ajax API will start to get some of these benefits. It will begin to grow faster and cooler.

But having said all of that, It still has some distance to cover before I become it’s fan. Starting from reducing the number of text boxes to removing unnecessary links like “save to my web”.

Kudos to the technical for achieving something close to a marvel. Writing this kind of Javascript and CSS is a painstaking effort for sure.