New Satellite Imagery and Performance Improvements

Posted by Joel Headley, Google Maps API Evangelist

Recent changes to the Maps API v2 include several bug fixes, improvements in API performance, and updated high-resolution satellite imagery for places around the world.

• New satellite imagery. We've updated a significant portion of our imagery database. We now have high-resolution imagery for 17 additional US cities (Albuquerque, Augusta, Baltimore, Corpus Christi, Houston, Little Rock, McAllen, Miami, Philadelphia, Pierre, Pittsburg, Riverside-San Bernadino, San Diego, San Juan, Spokane, St. Louis, Wichita), 6 additional prefectures in Japan (Chiba, Ehime, Kagawa, Kanagawa, Nara, Shizuoka), 7 additional German cities (Dusseldorf, Erlangen, Fuerth, Gelsenkirchen, Ludwigshafen, Muenchen, Schwerte, Karlsruhe), and also in the Netherlands. We've also significantly increased our coverage and updated the imagery for states throughout the US (Califonia, Georgia, Montana, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Maryland, Texas, Florida, Maine, Louisiana, New York).


• Changes to error handling in the API. Previously, if an error occured within an event handler, the Maps API code would catch the error and suppress it, meaning the map would continue to execute despite the errors. Many developers told us this made it very hard to debug code within event handlers, so we've changed the Maps API to no longer suppress these errors. If your mashup code was working perfectly fine with 2.62 but the same code stops working with 2.63, it probably means there were errors in your event handlers. If you experience this problem and are unable to resolve it, please post feedback in the Maps API discussion forum.


• Speedups to addOverlay(). Recently we sped up the performance of the removeOverlay() method, and we're following up by speeding up the performance of addOverlay(), meaning it's now much faster to add markers to a map. A first sets of optimizations went in, which reduces the time it takes to add 100 markers to about 55% of what past versions required. You can see for yourself by testing test the performance of the current revision vs an older revision.


• GTileLayerOverlay bugfixes. We've fixed the issues that were raised in the forum. Remember that you call addOverlay() and removeOverlay() on a GTileLayerOverlay object, not on a GTileLayer object.


• Draggable Markers. We've improved the draggable markers, giving you a little more flexibility when implementing them. Now you can choose to move the marker up or the "X" down, in response to some feedback we received on the forum. Just set your GMarkerOptions to dragCrossMove: true.

Improving performance in the API v2 is keeping us busy, and we just want to remind everyone to upgrade to v2. We plan to shut down API v1 within a month or so. If you haven't upgraded yet, please visit our upgrade guide.

API v1 Current: 1.31
API v1 Default: 1.31
API v2 Current: 2.63
API v2 Default: 2.62