Jason Levitt recently announced in a Yahoo! Developer Network blog entry (dated December 21, 2007) that Yahoo! Maps is now pure JavaScript. In the past it was a hybrid Flash/JavaScript application. The new port brings, according to Levitt, “at least double the performance of the previous Flash-based version”. And of note to developers, the enhanced version of the Yahoo! Maps AJAX API which is being used in the newest version of Yahoo! Maps will be made available to developers sometime in 2008.
To be honest, I haven’t paid all that much attention to Yahoo! Maps over the last couple of years, as both their “flagship” application (maps.yahoo.com) and their API have, to be quite honest, failed to impress. And (staying honest here), after using the application and perusing the API again tonight, I’ll have to say that I’m still not all that impressed:
- The application’s responsiveness just doesn’t seem to be up to par when compared to Google and Microsoft’s mapping applications (maps.google.com and maps.live.com, respectively). Please note that at this point, this is just an observation; I haven’t conducted – or even looked for – any performance tests, but I definitely think that Yahoo! has a long way to go before they’ll be able to start seriously competing against Google and Microsoft.
- On top of this, the look and feel of the application just doesn’t do it for me. In my opinion, Microsoft – with its latest release – has the best looking and most usable interface out there. Google still has more “Wow!” features (“Wow! I can drag a route to change it!” ), but I don’t think that I’ve ever actually used any of them.
To close, I’m disappointed that Yahoo! – one of the companies that really led the way in the early (2005) web map API days – has fallen so far behind. I hope that this coming version of their Maps AJAX API will bring them back into the competition.