Move over Google Maps, Map24 covers Ireland much better

'Krustyclown2001' points out, over on the OpenEir GPS mapping project, that Map24 now have the updated NavTeq coverage of Ireland. I have to agree with him - it is indeed very impressive. Much more so than Google maps anyway.

Comments

[Damien]

The interface is a little buggy on my mac, but I have to agree- the street level navigation is much better than Google (around Letterkenny, anyway). Great site.

[Justin]

Yeah -- the data's there -- it could even navigate a route from my house in Stoneybatter to the castle in Sligo I'm getting married in in a week and a half! ;)

The site interface is buggy, though -- lots of 'broken image' icons when I go to the print page, and it's slow. On top of that, it seems to be averse to creating a permalink for a set of directions, which is annoying...

still, it's the best out there right now. Come on Google, you have serious competition now!

[Aehso]

Impressive alright, Irish mapping lurches into the 21st century, curtesy of a foreign enterprise, what a shame. And it'd be nice if they put Borris back into Carlow - it seems to have magically moved into Kilkenny.

BTW, I'm not finding the interface slow or buggy (as other mention here) though my machine is a beast and my Firefox is using the latest Java5 plugin (always helps, they are working hard on the Java2D impl in Java5).

[John Ward]

I'm very impressed. The 3D view is very cool.

Free geocoding service is an added bonus. Bizmaps now have some serious competition.

[John Handelaar]

There's an Ireland link (http://www.ie.map24.com ) as well as a UK one.

I re-mention with some surprise that this has not, in fact, broken my lycos-to-map24-to-googlemaps trick (http://handelaar.org/node/584 ), so you can still use Map24's geocoding and Google's rather better (imho) renderings.

[David Behan]

I use the Google Map API on a couple of sites but the coverage isn't great. I must say that map24's coverage is much better but it crashed both my FF1.5 and IE7 on a number of occasions. Maybe i'm trying to do too much for it to handle. I was considering using this as an optional alternative to Google Maps but after it boosted my FF memory usage to 148,000k and my IE7 to 120,000k. There seems to be a lot of memory leaks to deal with, where google doesn't seem to have that problem. Other than that, it's a good step forward. I like the 3d view and how it zooms to locations.

Rgds,

Dave

[James Corbett]

Hmmm, I didn't seem to experience those problems David but then again I haven't really used it a whole lot to be honest. Congratulations on making the Golden Spiders shortlist by the way.

[David Behan]

I did some more searching and came across Yahoo Maps and it has a good interface and it's got better coverage of Ireland. Take Navan, for example! In Google, it's missing lots of roads on the outskirts of the town while Yahoo has those roads/estates:

Google - http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&z=14&ll=53.64535,-6.687326&spn=0.033224,0.080509&om=1
Yahoo - http://maps.yahoo.com/#mvt=m&trf=0&lon=-6.682992&lat=53.645121&mag=4

Thx James - hopefully I'll be coming home with a spider under my arm next week!!! :D