The new Yahoo! Maps tile engine Galileo is beautiful. Beauty in this case is very readable text labels, color coded neighborhoods, county line markings, icons for things like hospitals, and on regional views, a shaded topographic mapping.

The thing that impresses me most about this release is that you get a lot more information without feeling like you are in information overload. All of the new features are subtle and intuitive drawing from everything people already know from using a paper map. I’m used to the pastel fields of color with an all caps word in the middle that defines it. I’m used to the little blue square with an H in it for hospital.

I’m also impressed at how well they blended the level of detail across zoom levels. Topography would be very hard to past at the fully zoomed in level just as color coding neighborhoods wouldn’t make sense at larger views. That seems pretty obvious, but what I think was trickier are the many levels of zoom between that aren’t obvious about how much detail is needed. So far I think it strikes a great balance.

My last kudos is on the text. it is very readable with a sub-pixel stroke of white to accentuate it. It is also a pretty font. This one change alone makes the map go from functional to designed in my humble opinion.

Now that I have paid homage the lovely, rich simplicity of the map, I hope they do extend their maps even further. When there are icons for hospitals and airports, I’d love to be able to click on them and route to them. In the case of a hospital, I have had the need to find one quickly and it was a real horror. I can at least see where they are, but I would still have to route myself to them or figure out the intersection and enter it myself. I know this isn’t trivially easy to do since putting to many interactive markers would interfere with dragging, but it would still be cool.

This would be especially interesting since the tiles for Yahoo! Maps are in SWF format. You could actual bake in fully interactive elements to the tiles themselves rather than just relying on painted pixels.

While they haven’t put a post up about the new tiles yet on the Y! Local and Maps blog, you should still check it out for lots of other interesting features that are available.

It just feels strange sitting in my very empty cube today. I’m done with my work, I did my farewell lunch, and took all of my stuff home yesterday. When Ray brought his SUV over yesterday to help me cart my stuff home, I told him I felt like I was back in college moving out from the dorm.

Life at Yahoo! really did have more similarity with my college experience than it did with any job I’ve had. We worked hard, pulled some all-nighters, drank some beer, and had a lot of fun. The cafeteria gives you a freshman 15; there is a quad with bands playing during lunch from time to time. I think my cube is about the size of my first dorm room too.

More than anything though, I learned a lot! With 14,000 employees here, I was exposed to so many different ideas, perspectives, cultures, and languages. As a former linguistics student, one of my most interesting points at Yahoo! was in my first cube where no one directly adjacent to my cube spoke English as a native language. Also, none of them spoke the same native language as the other. There were times we sounded like a meeting of the united nations.

After four years here, I guess it is time to “graduate” and move on. How fitting is it then, that the last thing I do at Yahoo! is go to the weekly platform engineering keg party?

P.S. I am however looking forward to no longer working for a company with a “!” at the end of its name. When Yahoo! is at the end of a sentence, it always sounds excited as in “Last Day at Yahoo!.” I swear, the “!” goes with the name, not glee at leaving.

If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the new Yahoo! Finance (Beta) including the new charts built in Flash. I think the finance team did a beautiful job on the new Flash charts. At the beginning of the project, Finance didn’t have any Flash developers. Rather than going down the hiring route for getting Flash expertise, they trained themselves and really knocked everyone’s socks off here.

You may also notice that the side panel of the charts is HTML-based. The finance group decided to go with a hybrid AJAX/Flash application. While I prefer Flash solutions overall for a variety of reasons, I think the overall feel is excellent. Without right clicking I wouldn’t know where one technology stopped and the other begins, just as it should be.

To check out some of the features of the charts, try comparing some different stock symbols, the graphing styles and most importantly the technical indicators. The technical indicators are very interesting modules that provide different perspectives on the displayed data. In addition though, they actually give information for novices such as me to know just what the heck I am looking at.

After a tough decision, I’ve decided it is time to move on from Yahoo! and accept a very exciting position at Adobe. Starting in about a week, I will be Sr. Product Manager for Designer/Developer Relations for Flash. I will also be product managing a designer/developer workflow project, but more on that later (when I know more about it ) ;). It looks like I will be splitting my time between the San Francisco and San Jose offices and will get the best of both worlds.

For now, I am wrapping up my projects at Yahoo! and will have to start the very long process of packing up my cube soon! After four years and six cubes, it will be very strange to not be surrounded by purple and yellow. On the upside (if it is a downside to get away from purple and yellow), I am very happy that my new position will give me a lot of opportunities to continue to interact with the Flash users at Yahoo! while working on a product that I am really passionate about.

Once I make the transition and am up to speed at Adobe I will start posting some more about the new job. While still at Yahoo!, I should mention that the Yahoo! Flash platform team is still hiring, so get your resume in (I’ve transitioned the hiring process, so emailing me about it won’t help much). I would also add that at Yahoo! I have had the opportunity of working with a lot of great people, but my manager, Thomas Sha is fantastic. I really regret that I won’t get to work for him more; but any skilled frontend developer should be tripping over themselves to work as part of his team.

Ok, so all of you folks that I have talked to over the years that don’t use Yahoo! Messenger because all of their friends are on MSN no longer have any excuses. Yahoo! Messenger/MSN Messenger interop is finally here. Go to Messenger.yahoo.com (or some MSN link that I can’t recall) and sign up for the interop beta.

For those of you that are already using the Messenger 8 beta, you will still need to go to the messenger site to sign up. Once added to the interop beta, you will be asked to sign out, then sign in again. At that point you can start adding your MSN contacts.

For you Flash users out there, now is the time to sign up for Yahoo! Messenger. While the interop goes both ways, it is much better to have a Y! account and interop with the MSN folks rather than vice versa. With a Yahoo! account and Y! Messenger client, you can build Flash plugins of your own. So come on over and support the messenger client that actually uses Flash.

Yahoo! Messenger just released a new beta this week with a plugin SDK so that you can customize messenger and build your own single or multi-user application. Messenger plugins are based on HTML, so you can write them just like a regular web page. Since we all know the best sites are built in Flash, I fully expect the best plugins to go the same direction.

Once you get the beta, you will find two places for plugins. The first is the tab area of your friends list. For any Flash Lite developers, I think this should be an interesting area. The space your get for a tab is not too far off from the screen real estate for a Flash Lite app. While we are waiting for the OEMs to deploy the Flash Lite player, Messenger should be a good area to showcase your content.

You can also add plugins to your IM window. If you are a game developer, this is an ideal way to get to work with multiplayer concepts, and actually get your game played by a network of millions of users. Messenger gives you a LOT of hooks to pass data, do permissioning, and otherwise deeply integrate into the Messenger experience. Even if you aren’t into games, there are a lot opportunities for creating multi user and collaborative applications.

Since I first heard about the feature I’ve been biting my tongue from wanting to tell all the Flash developers I know about this.

Now, for the really cool part: let’s talk Flash versions. Use filters, blend modes, the external Interface; they will always be available. The Y! Messenger install process is now installing the latest version of Flash for those that don’t have it. Now it is up to you to get all of your friends on Yahoo! to show them your cool plugins and help Flash Player penetration at the same time.