pirate map

Update: get the source for both the pirate and radar map.

With the power of Flash 8, you can customize the Yahoo! Maps on your site to actually blend with the surrounding design of the site or application. Forget about a rectangular maps and default colors of the map tiles. Use ActionScript, or the IDE to add runtime filters to the map tiles themselves.

To illustrate this, I’ve made two examples, a parchment pirate version of Maps (Aaaarrrr!), and a green-screen radar version of Maps. To create these effects, I’m using a variety of filters, blend modes and color transformations on the map tiles.

radar Map

I can also add custom overlays and markers such as Doppler weather or airplane positions for the radar map, or X’s drawn by a quill pen to mark the booty in my pirate map.

One of the things I would really like to do actually with the pirate map is to make it into a hot-cold game, where you wander around the country looking for your buried treasure based on hints (cold/warm/hot or geographical trivia). While I really like the visual design of the Yahoo! Maps, the application look of the maps really isn’t going to suit a game.

Regardless of what you want to do, the Yahoo! Maps API is a fantastic way to create very powerful maps for your own site that also allows you as much creative freedom as it does technical freedom.