You could create your own controls but it does kinda stink that you have to write your own mouse handlers to emulate the built in behaviors like Ctrl or Shift click and drag for rotating the map. I'm glad to hear that you've seen somewhere that they state guaranteed support for some years to come but it's sort of moot if they don't keep the API up to par with the other APIs. Also I haven't seen anything about use of the molehill APIs it seems like with Molehill coming around the corner they could implement Google Earth in the Flash API and take advantage of 2D optimization features as well. Like you said you can use FlexSpy or some other kind of tool to drill in through the class definitions at run-time but even with reverse engineering the run-time code there's not necessarily any way to modify the underlying objects, the only option would be to re-implement the whole thing so far as I can tell, there's still no way to make the map use your Camera class if you were to be able to create your own implementation, and there's no way to change these properties that only have getters and seem to be internally based on constants (seeing as how you can retrieve them but not set them). I do understand the need for intellectual property rights and basically get that it's not always in a companies best interest to release source but I just can't put my finger on what the motivation is for Google to keep this source closed. I'm not asking for the source that does the back-end processing or tiles or image analysis or Google documents or anything that really should remain proprietary, but I'm not sure why the Flash maps API would be closed source (c'mon just let us see the code.... please :). I bet the bug fixes would go a lot smoother if you had all of the users of the API testing and submitting examples including fixes, I don't see how this wouldn't benefit all parties. Google gets free ideas from the public to make their product better and we get a better product to work with and the ability to make it better for our uses. I mean they managed to build Android on top of Linux and keep it open for the most part why not the maps APIs? I tried looking for the source for any of the maps APIs the closest I could find was a minimized and obfuscated version of the js file: http://maps.gstatic.com/intl/en_us/mapfiles/api-3/6/2/main.js While I do totally appreciate the things that are already out the lack of source is the source of a great amount of frustration and confusion and delay in getting fixes and features IMHO.
Also the swc itself that you download as part of the SDK doesn't actually contain the definitions for a lot of the classes the swcs merely contain the interfaces and references to load up another swf at runtime that contains the class definitions, this is also true of the playerglobal.swc that's included in the Flex framework, it contains "signatures" for the methods that the Flash player plugin actually contains the implementation for... the swf format itself is "open source" in that there's a white paper that describes the details of the format as is AMF but the Flash player plugin itself isn't (although since the SWF format is publicly known there are decompilers that can reverse the Actionscript ByteCode ABC into AS3, also there's an open source plugin known as gnash though I don't know how well it's been maintained). I'm not saying Google should give away the farm or that they should even leave it up to the community to put out releases but letting us see the code and contribute couldn't hurt so far as I can tell. Anyway thanks for reading through it and I appreciate the feedback. Shaun -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Maps API For Flash" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-maps-api-for-flash/-/ahGm_UvUJ_kJ. 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.
