Fireday - Firefox extension reviews for August 10, 2007

Friday, August 10, 2007 4:00 AM

Posted by Jonathan Danylko | Tag: Fireday | Comments: 1 | View blog reactions

This week: Mini-Map Sidebar

Mini-Map Sidebar

Rating: 4/5

Mapping seems to be the thing that has everybody's attention nowadays and this extension was no exception.

Overview

The Mini-Map Sidebar is an extension that incorporates a lot of mapping utilities inside a compact extension. The extension includes mapping sites and utilities such as Google, Yahoo!, Live Local, Tagzania, and Platial.

Installation

The installation was flawless and showed no errors, which was a great relief. To activate the extension, press CTRL-SHIFT-E or select it through the View > Sidebar dropdown menu.

When you first display the Mini-Map Sidebar, it is probably the most attractive sidebar interface I've seen, but at the same time, seemed a little intimidating.

One of the first things I wanted to do was, of course, find my home through this interface. At first, I didn't know how to enter an address. After hovering over the icons a couple of times, I found what looked like a font enlarge icon, but it was actually a "pan to an address" function.

After typing in my address, it immediately appeared on the map so I was ready to add my new location. I clicked the "Add Address" option on the far right and a dialog appeared.  One thing I noticed was that I had to enter the address a second time in the dialog box. If it was filled in for me, a title would be all that is needed to save your record.

The drag and drop area immediately turned into a list box with tabs at the bottom.

Features

Now the fun begins. For those who use Google Maps, you should feel right at home. All of the functions in Google Maps are available through the interface: Zoom in, Zoom out, Road map, Satellite Map, Hybrid Map, and Traffic Information.

When you save an address, the drag and drop area turns into a list box with all of your addresses available. Right-clicking on an address in the list is where the fun begins.

The To and From addresses are provided if you are looking for directions. One nice feature is that when you add an address to your list, you immediately have access to that address in the Directions tab. Also, if you don't want to use Google Directions, you can select Yahoo! Directions or Microsoft Directions. That's another feature that I like about this extension is the ability to choose which service you want to use.

For you Google Earthers out there, there is even a place to store your most common GeoRSS/KML coordinates.

Conclusion

The Mini-Map Sidebar takes some of the most common features of a mapping site and provides a consolidated mapping tool that delivers results.

One complaint I have was the toolbar. When a toolbar is created in any kind of software, the most commonly used functions are placed at the front of the toolbar. It should almost be a sequence of what you want the user to accomplish (Pan to an Address first, Add Address second, etc.). With the toolbar in this extension, it took a while for me to become familiar with how it was put together, but once I understood that, I was able to move forward.

Overall, I think the extension has some great features and deserves a rating of 4 out of 5.

 

See ya next week.

If you want your Firefox add-on reviewed, please contact me with the URL and we'll let you know when it's reviewed.

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Chatterbox - 1 Comments

1.  Tones on Monday, August 13, 2007 4:52 AM said:

Hi Jonathan, author of minimap here.

Thank you for your review :-) Hope the extension proves useful for people, hacked it together to fulfill a need of mine and thought why not release it for others to use!

Certainly the way I write something is not always how people would start using it straight off - your initial attempts to pan to and then add an address are a good example of this.

The Pan to address is if you want to quickly look at a map for an address - to add an address I bypass this button altogether and go straight for the Add Address/Location option no matter where the map might be. That is why the dialog is not populated with your previous Pan To... query. Adding an address through this dialog will Pan and add it to the list.

As you are probably finding out, the extension unravels itself as you get into it more, after initial installation I purposely chose to have the big old 'Drop address or Link' text to start people off rather than a blank addresslist/directions tab. I am working on a set of instructions to get people started, but accept it may be a little complicated in places, particularly your point of first installation with all the toolbar buttons etc.

Cheers, Tones

 

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