JD on EP

Michael Bazeley and Solution Watch describe the advantages of the Yahoo interface from a user's point of view... a good intro for those who wonder why they'd want to use the app, rather than how it was made.

In comments at 37 Signals: "the only thing that i didn’t like about it was that after browsing around on the map, i had a bunch of yahoo entries in my history, so i had to hit the back button about 50 times to get back to where i thought i should have gone with a single back-click." (I think it's cool that Yahoo Maps shows it's possible to get application states into the browser's navigation stack, but I always found that "back button doesn't work right" objection to be strange anyway -- the browser navigates documents, and I suspect that an Undo function would be better in the app-on-the-page than in the page-switching mechanism.)

At Metafilter, after a bunch of content-free "eww flash!" comments, someone tickles my snarkybone by writing: "Did Flash steal your girlfriend once or something?" (The Metafilter comments also mention Paul Neave's work, which I appreciate.)

Top negatives have been "Where's Europe?" and "slow for me". Working out legal agreements for mapping data for all countries takes more time than for one country, please don't feel slighted. The "slow for me" posts usually alternate with "wow it's fast!" posts, which should provide a clue... I'm guessing most of those with slower action are in Firefox/Mac, and if so, then try Safari for faster performance on the same machine. (For escalation, try detailing what precisely is slow, whether it's loading new map data, or scrolling with already-local map data, or a particular operation... I hit it in FF/Mac on dialup early this morning and app performance was great, but loading new map data remained the sticking point.)

I saw a couple of comments from people who said they couldn't see it in Firefox with FlashBlocker, but that combo works normally for me... I can't yet repro their reports, don't know yet what the missing ingredient is to see the problem.

Rich Ziade likes it, and gets two "but my 64-bit linux!" comments in reply. Then he writes something which somehow sounds much more persuasive from him than from me: "Let's be realistic folks. Flash is arguably the most widely deployed platform in the world. Anyone who's suffered thru browser compliance efforts across Safari, Opera, IE, Mozilla knows the pain avoided." I guess this means I owe Rich a beer.... ;-)

Mike Chambers notes that MXNA now has a Yahoo-specific view into 600 weblogs via the Yahoo Maps Smart Category. (What makes it "smart"? It combines categorization with some text analysis to find releveant posts automatically.)

If you use HTML or other markup, then take a look at Jesse Warden's example on Flexcoders. Yes, this markup produces an interactive SWF file! You do not need to look at a timeline or asset library if you don't wish -- you can mark up text which is then compiled to SWF if you wish. More info on Flex 2 is at Macromedia Labs.

Nat Torkington at O'Reilly has one of the better early write-ups on advantages of the Yahoo services API over others... Simon Willison also focuses on the services, rather than just a particular interface.

Jeremy Zawodny has a whole bunch of selected links to posts from others on this set of applications... in comments people particularly appreciate the geocoding API, which finds where you are in a very HarryPotter-ish way.

One of the longest negatives is at netweb blog, but the text itself has some usability problems... I'm guessing he's waiting for map data for a new region to be transferred to his machine.

Robert Scoble had a multi-screenful hunkatext on the subject, which after three readings I think just boils down to "Google has better ads".

By now there's probably been a second round of writing... if you saw something which would be good to get into this edited list of links, then please feel free to add it in comments, many thanks! :)