I have returned to using the Google Maps Flash API and have been reminded just how insanely annoying it is to use.
* Nothing has code based documentation, so you get no information within the Flash Builder interface. This is just good coding practice. * Arguments have names that give no hint as to what they are, just arg1, arg2 etc. * With no released source we can't investigate how things work when we end up discovering the holes in the documentation. * Things that have been brought up for years have had no action (Security sandbox violation for pretty much anything done over a map anyone?) * The javascript api moves forward and gets vector based rendering while the flash side is left with image tiles. * No indication of the future of this api Real world example where all of this has come together to really frustrate me? Sure: I have a google map inside a Flex app. We have an enterprise licence for this, and so am already offside for the security sandbox violation messages filling my console window while debugging. On this map I lay down polygons representing postcodes. I do this with google's encoded polyline interface because it's what we started using for performance reasons in the html version before things got faster there. Well, that and there has been no indication of whether the Flash interface is heading the same was as the javascript API and phasing this out in favour of large lists of points. So, all ok so far. Then I overlay Papervision3D columns onto these polygons to represent data. All ok still. Now I want to limit how much a user can change the attitude (pitch/yaw/ roll) of the camera. Oh, cool, camera has maxPitch, maxYaw, maxRoll attributes. I'll just set these. No I won't, they're read only. Ok, surely they can be set via a function? Hmmm, can't find any. What about initOptions? Nope, not mentioned there either. Can I intercept the ATTITUDE_CHANGE_STEP event and handle it myself? No, that doesn't seem to work either. I'll just control click into the Map3D class or the Camera class and see how I'm supposed to handle this... nope, can't do that, no source. So, I'm left with a map which I'm SURE I should be able to limit the movement of, but with no way of ascertaining how I'm supposed to. All of this in an aging API that we have been given no indication of whether it's going to be supported any further. This sort of thing happens time and time again. Either the code documentation needs to be seriously updated or the source should be released so we can actually use it properly. I tells yah, it's enough to push me over to Yahoo or OpenStreetMaps or... heaven forbid Bing maps -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Maps API For Flash" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-maps-api-for-flash?hl=en.
