Apparently Google started charging for the use of its maps now, Groundspeak has elected to move over to Openmaps, currently powered by Leaflet and tiles provided by Mapquest. What are the benefits and disadvantages to cachers?
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| The New Maps |
The picture above shows my favourite part of this transition: Clickable caches from long distances. In the above picture I can see all of southern Ontario and still pick out caches and see the cache information. It still even gives you a choice box when you've selected multiple caches. It also still keeps the basic features of the old maps with selectable cache types, pocket queries (which seem faster to me) and the advantages of openmaps (trails and other user added features).
The bad is the load times, which seems to fluctuate and are at time not even noticeable. Reportedly Groundspeak is going to host the maps on its own server which should knock out the load times. The ugly is also shown in the first picture. Gaps in the satellite imagery which might not even be gaps as it could be loading times as well.
Overall I would call this a great improvement over the old maps. I miss the look, but still the ease of viewing caches is just amazing.
