It's a click & drag situation

Posted by Ryan Sturgell and Barry Brumitt, Software Engineers, Google Maps

Can you imagine going back to clicking arrows and waiting for the screen to refresh just to move the map left/right/up/down? It'd be as big a bummer as going back to 8-track tapes. Today, we're taking another big step forward with driving directions in Google Maps: now you can click & drag to change destinations along your route.

Let's imagine you want to help your friend Terry, who's visiting Seattle this week, by giving her directions to your favorite beach volleyball spot on the waterfront in Kirkland, Washington.

Step 1. Terry is staying somewhere in downtown Seattle, so you zoom into that location and add this destination by right-clicking on somewhere in that general vicinity.

Step 2. To set the End Destination, you repeat the same process, zooming in and right-clicking on the park. But if you've selected the wrong park by mistake, you can now change this destination just by clicking & dragging the marker from the wrong park to the correct one. And while you're dragging, you can watch the route change in real time (including a running ticker of the current street name plus an updated distance and time of the route).



Voila! You're done. If you click "Link to this Page," you can email the link to Terry. But wait! She is planning to drive over on a weekday morning during rush hour, and you'd like to adjust the route so that she misses 520 bridge traffic. So...

Step 3. To ensure the directions take the I-90 Bridge across Lake Washington, you can click on the route itself from where it goes across the 520 bridge and drag it to the I-90 bridge, again watching the route update while you drag.



So there you have it. Once you've used click & drag for creating and modifying routes, we think you'll find that you simply can't fathom how you managed without it. I mean, where are your 8-tracks?