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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

I'm checking out the new Google Maps beta, and if you zoom all the way out in Earth mode, it actually puts the clouds back-in -- based on real-time satellite data.

Pretty cool. Now if there were just a time slider...

But it's also very cool that Google Maps no longers looks like a big patchwork of images from totally different satellites and sources. It actually looks seamless now, no matter where you're zooming. That's pretty incredible. EDIT: the more I've been playing with it, the cooler it is. You can actually get a sense of how the colors of houses, roads, lawns, fields, etc. merge as you gradually zoom out, seamlessly. I've never seen anything like this -- wow.

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I'm just waiting for performance to finish improving. It is better than it used to be (used to take 20-30 seconds to zoom on a modern computer), but still not great.

I've had quite a few crashes with the beta, and a number of features are now missing (Particularly, multiple stop directions). :(

>multiple stop directions

Every time I fire up a private browsing session to do a multiple stop route I am a bit amazed that they released it as beta with that feature missing. Obviously we're in a minority though.

Other problems I've noticed with the new google maps:

(1) performance really sucks on linux/firefox

(2) text renders incorrectly on linux/firefox to the point where much of it is barely readable

(3) they've futzed around with the UI in an apparent attempt to get rid of the "layers" concept, but this has negative effects (in particular this makes "transit mode", a temporary mode that turns off as soon you do anything else; in the old maps it's a setting that persists), and in general seems more confusing than the old way

One hopes they'll fix these problems before making the new maps the default, but ... the signs so far aren't very promising (the browser probs were around even in the old "webgl maps")...

A time slider used to be present in Google Earth software an year back. Don't know about it now though.

My hometown still looks horrible :'( https://maps.google.com/?ll=65.14846,-13.690295&spn=0.015042...

Now I'm imagining that all the houses and people in the east end of town are blurry and have strange colors :)

'Oh la-dee-dar; you're from the fancy part of town with less blur!' Clearly the sign of a division of class.

But you live in a weird country, where nobody lives. Surely you'll see more just by looking outside the window?

Hehe, even the middle of the Indian Ocean is better: https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Port-aux-Fran%C3%A7ais,+Terre...

it was even updated this year.

Cool, I'll take the pink shack.

:(, but there are places with worse imagery https://maps.google.com/?ll=65.14846,-13.690295&spn=0.015042...

crap, copied a wrong link, i meant this https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Dilijan,+Tavush,+Armenia&hl=e...

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