Tuesday, August 21, 2007

cmd+1 vs Yandex maps

I love mac shortcuts. Nobody ever thinks about sharing them across applications. After you get used to cmd+<N> for navigating to the Nth tab of Firefox, you get much fun in Safari, where it opens the Nth bookmark by default. But that's nothing compared to Yandex maps. You carefully zoom into the location you wanted to find and share, press cmd+1 to get back to your mailbox in the first tab and find your map zoomed out to the furthest zoom level. I used to do it 2-3 times in a row – imagine that your computer reboots after Alt+Tab and you'll know how I felt. Anyway, didn't they test maps.yandex on real mac users?

Speaking about Yandex maps, I wonder how their tiles really work. If you look at Moscow, you'll see the static street labels and smooth map scrolling. When you come to Samara, you see that the map is a 10x10 grid and the scrolling is quantified to these 1/10 steps. And the street labels travel across the tiles when you scroll! Pretty annoying, if you ask me – you don't drag a static map any more, it's changing and you have to concentrate on it. On the bright side, the labels do their best to fit in the screen (at least they try to). St Pete used to be like Samara a couple of weeks ago, and now it's a static map. Did they decide to get rid of the jumping labels? Then why does it take so long for all the cities? And how does it actually work? I guess they don't render tiles on the fly, so it means they have 100 potential tiles for each place on a map and the 10x10 grid of small tiles helps save some disk space if most of these 100 are identical?

2 comments:

  1. I especially like their Excel/Word shortcuts, or to be more exact - a complete lack of them whatsoever.

    On the other hand, Mac+, or Mac-~ is cute.

    ReplyDelete
  2. >>I especially like their Excel/Word shortcuts, or to be more exact - a complete lack of them whatsoever.

    office 2003 shortcuts

    some of the office 2007 shortcuts

    enjoy

    ReplyDelete