This is just about the maps for now, not about stand-alone software like Google Earth.

I’ve become impressed by the Google Maps API when working with it, by the support from the Google team and by the constant feature updates we keep getting - and of course by many of the extensions from the community.

I’ve tried out PdMarker, Clusterer and a few other extensions with varying results, and believe some of those features should be part of the standard API. Today I actually saw in one of the Google groups threads that some of those features will come to us soon, and especially the marker.onHover() for tooltips and marker icon change seems to be on its way.

As a way of learning the API I’ve followed some of Mike’s tips for managing the maps - and noticed it seems very updated (I haven’t seen any dates) - as well as following the official blog, looking a lot at the docs and sometimes checking out Google Maps Mania.

Even though I’m impressed by the maps, marker overlays, geocoders etc I am also a bit disappointed in the fact that I noticed this technology slowing my browser, and in conjunction my entire system, down so I can’t work at normal pace. Of course I understand it takes a bit of code to get it all running, but it seems to me there are still some memory leaks - and I really don’t like the message about ‘unresponsive script’ Firefox tells me about every time I exit the browser after looking at maps for a while….

I’m looking forward to the next update - but even more, I’m looking forward to GMap3(), hopefully with better OnUnload()…

I wish you a nice mapping..