Jeremiah's Profile

Member since March 22, 2005

  • Name

    Jeremiah Smith

  • Location:

    United States of America

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Recent Posts

  1. Review - Ubuntu

    6.04 (Dapper Drake) Flight CD 3 (Jan 17, 2006)

    I moved from 5.10 to Breezy on my laptop about a month ago and have had only 1 problem since then. KDE has a segfault when I'm shutting down. Really minor since no work is lost or anything.

    Other than that, despite being alphaware, Breezy has been working just fine for me.

  2. Comment - MSN In Need of an Image Makeover?

    6.04 (Dapper Drake) Flight CD 3 (Mar 22, 2005 - 9:21 AM)

    Since they used MSN Maps as an example, here's some specific comments on that service:

    1) The map size is horribly small compared to Googles. On my monitor, the Google map is almost 8 times the size of the MSN map.

    2) Clutter. The ad on the MSN site takes up almost as many square inches as the actual map. 14 square inches for the map on my monitor vs 8 square inches of advertisement. And so much wasted space trying to keep the page 8 inches wide. I'm only running at 1280x1024 on a 17 inch monitor, and that leaves me with a 5 inch band on the right that's completely wasted.

    3) Basic usability. When I put an address in on MSN, the default zoom is so far out that I can't see the surrounding streets well. They essentially give me "city view". Google gives me a "neighborhood view," zoomed in so I can get a good look at surrounding streets and their names. MSN only gives me 3 or 4 major arteries. I have to zoom in to get a better look.

    4) Advanced usability. Here's an MSN link, the address changed:

    http://mappoint.msn.com/
    (zudlqx45cny0a3vfhvruix30)/
    map.aspx?L=USA&C=41.65269%2c-91.57834&A=7.16667&
    P=|41.65269%2c-91.57834|
    123+Fake+Street%2cFake+Town%2cST+12345|L1|

    [edit: The msn url is either too long, malformed or otherwise breaks the comment code and is not displaying correctly. I tried to break it onto several lines, so we'll see if that works. The fact that the google link just worked helps prove my point.]

    Here's the same in Google:
    http://maps.google.com/maps?q=123 fake street, any town, st 12345&hl=en

    Which one is easier to construct if you want to make a quick link on your website to a map to your house?

    These are the big differences between the 2 that I saw and why the MSN feature isn't worth visiting or using.