All,
None of my vehicles have MPH gauges, they are all km/h. However, only
one of my cars has a navigation system. Therefore, I find myself often
using google maps for directions. It's a great piece of software,
except that it simply does not do metric for the USA.
It's fairly annoying, as the Google Maps API function for waypoints,
coordinates, etc., are all in metres, but for the US, they wrap
everything in feet and miles for the display. Additionally, people have
been asking them for metric measure in the US for years with no results.
Very frustrating.
They're essentially trying to be smart about it, but failing. For
example, if you put a starting point in Canada, and go into the US, they
assume you're Canadian and want all distances in kilos. Do the
opposite, and it displays in miles...not too helpful for a Canadian
motorist heading home!
I got annoyed with this fact, so I sat down and wrote a little piece of
software to correct some of these issues. It's a user script for
Greasemonkey (http://www.greasespot.net/), a piece of software for the
Firefox web browser that lets you modify any webpage to your liking.
So, if you use Firefox and would like google maps in kilometres and
metres instead of miles and feet, install Greasemonkey if you aren't
already running it, and then visit:
http://www.mikepalumbo.com/projects/metricmaps/
to download & use the metric maps project. Eventually this will be a
simple Firefox plugin instead of using Greasemonkey, making this even
easier to install.
ISSUES:
----
I want to stress that this is a BETA version and has several
shortcomings which I'll be addressing over the course of the next week:
1) Currently it only works when the map coordinates are in the address
bar, such as URLs like this:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Philadelphia+to+King%20of%20Prussia%20Mall&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wl
I haven't yet implemented the code to catch click events once you're on
the map page, so if you change the address, it won't update in metric
measure. *Yet*. For the time being, go to google.com, type in your
search like "Philadelphia to King of Prussia Mall", and then click maps.
All metric.
2) #1 also means waypoints and other page redraws won't be in metric.
Again, this will be fixed soon enough.
3) I haven't yet figured out the call to make km the preferred measure
for the scale at the bottom of the map. As such, mi still appears on
top. There is actually a variable called "_mPreferMetric" in the google
maps API, I have to look into changing that so that it reverses the scale.
FEEDBACK:
----
I could really use some feedback on this project, especially in regards
to how many significant digits I should be using for the conversion.
For example, without the script running, step 2 in the above map link
reads, "Turn right at N Juniper St, 354 ft"
With it running: "Turn right at N Juniper St, 107.9 m". The original
unit has no decimal places, so should my metric unit maintain the same
level of precision? Or is one significant digit okay?
Thanks, I hope to have this much more feature-rich in the near future!
Cheers,
Mike
