I miss the old Streetview

Recently I’ve been updating a site with some quite complex map related functionality from Google maps v2 to Google maps v3. All in all it has been straight forward and worth doing.

The one disappointment IMO has been Streetview – the old version was so much slicker. The new version is easier to implement, but that is as positive as I can be. I miss being able to click in the distance and zoom down the road; I miss the swoosh as you move from position to position; I miss built in Full Screen.

On the flip side we now the have API for static streetview images – I’ve been using Jamie Thompson’s brilliant work on getting static map images up until now, but it is time to move on.

Slightly irritating is the fact you need to convert old (v2) Streetview panorama locations (if you have them saved) to show the locations as static images or as saved Streetview panoramas.

To convert a v2 panorama to a v3 panorama:

  • ‘yaw’ has become ‘heading’
  • change the sign of ‘pitch’ e.g. -1.80999 becomes 1.80999
  • add 1 to your ‘zoom’ level