When I wrote my first post on how excited I was about Google Maps, I had no earthly idea what the broad capabilities of the application were. I don’t think Jon Udell even did at first, but he quickly discovered some really amazing stuff and illuminates these possibilities for us with fantastic screencasts (using my favorite program, Camtasia). Udell first created a screencast about using Javascript to make driving directions come alive. All it takes is a little bit of javascript to animate a route, and Jon is also nice enough to show us how. He also describes using GPS data in Google Maps to “annotate the world”. It’s all really amazing, and he is certainly right that we (or at least I) will never be using Mapquest again. I’ve been using Google Maps every day to find fabulous bakeries in Chicago, and I’m begining to wonder how I ever lived with crappy mapping programs before this. Thanks Google and thanks Jon for broadening our horizons!