A recent report says that Yahoo! Maps has about 29.4 million users, easily making it one of the most popular and visited Flex applications ever. Some recent improvements should push that number higher and I’m happy to see my favorite Easter egg has survived.
Congrats to the entire Yahoo! Maps team for recently adding some highly detailed and stunning enhancements to the map tiles. Amongst many other new features (Europe coverage and point-of-interest searching), the new tiles really stand out and make it much easier to scan for roads, highways, parks and other landmarks. The 2-year-old Flex app’s performance seems to have improved a bit, too. Although there isn’t a dramatic enough change that would indicate a long overdue migration to Flex 2 has been made.
One loss in the enhancement is that with the new tiles it seems the infamous Sea Monster Easter egg is no more. This bonus was found, according to a Flickr user, when you zoomed in all the way and panned left of the Golden Gate bridge.
I am happy to discover that my favorite Easter egg is still very much in tact. Switch to Satellite view, click on the map and then, while pressing “Shift”, type in the first letter of my Favorite place in the world. HINT: It’s home of the 2004 World Series Champions, where you can find a Green Monster. There may be other letters this works with, but you’ll just have to play around! Let me know what you find.
Links: Yahoo! Maps, Flickr “Yahoo! Maps Easter Egg”, YLocalBlog, Wired News, CNET
So SHIFT+B anywhere on the map? Not getting it
Nice try, Jacob… but it’s a place, not a city.
hehe
The tiles look great, especially over your Favorite place in the world. 🙂
the api has a few more i think….
hehe
The tiles look great, especially over your Favorite place in the world. 🙂
the api has a few more i think….
So sad to see the sea monster go bye bye! 🙁 But the new tiles do look great.
Meanwhile, Google Maps has over 70M users, without the use of flash. Yet another area where Yahoo is way behind.
Google Maps does use Flash for the recent Street Level view enhancement. Expect to see more usage of Flash from Google as they seem to get closer with Adobe. Meanwhile, I’m expecting to see Yahoo! do a little bit more with Microsoft technology.