A few years back I worked on a project that used the Google Maps API and at the time I was charged with recommending to the client whether to use Flash or Javascript/HTML to get the job done. At the time there was no readily accessible Flash API for Google maps, and I wasn’t that keen to go with the Yahoo or Microsoft offerings (though Yahoo now has a very robust Flash API, the Microsoft (surprise surprise) one doesn’t… though I found this Silverlight version). FYI the Kaurna Place Names site was developed to identify and map places with Kaurna (Aboriginal) names and to encourage the use and increase knowledge of these names. It begins with names in southern Kaurna country (which is the region of Australia where I’m from).
So there’s the back story. I recently came across a post which talked about the Google Maps API now being available for Flash AS3. With my current push to learn about Flex I was also pleased to see that there were components available that you could just drop into your MXML and whamo, insta-map!
Here’s what I pieced together, hopefully it illustrates what can be done with a few Flex components and the Maps code provided from the Google Maps developer site.
View source is enabled in the following example.
Obviously it’s not a scratch on Paul Neave’s venerable Flash Earth, but then this example only took 15 minutes to knock together 😉
Nice demo! Glad you like our API!
Thanks for the comments Pamela. Seems you’re doing a pretty good job being the public face of the Google Maps API – http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com/2008/10/updates-to-the-google-maps-api-for-flash-including-support-for-flash-cs3/
Keep up the good work 😉