The GoogleMaps 2 plugin is finally ready

It has taken quite longer than I expected in order to get the new functionality ready, but there was lot of internal changes, some small ones, other big ones that required testing, adjusting, fixing bugs, then a new idea to add a little detail and all the testing was needed again.

I have already explained the main ideas behind the new version: removing some limitations, and giving more power to the user. Of course there are lots of other things that can be done with the Google Maps API, but it would requiere someone a lot of dedicated time in order to put everything in a single interface, and also make it usable by plain users (the ones that ask "the installer now says 'Next', should I press it?)

Unfortunately as this is just javascript and this version is not open source I can't provide a demo so you can test it because then it would be trivial to copy it. I don't think it's worth my time to write/use any kind of obfuscation so you'll have to judge based on the 1.97 demo and checking the new manual. (an advice to any 'smart guy': don't bother trying to guess filenames, there's no zip uploaded and if I upload the data, it will be available only under a password protection), only the install guide is available.

 

One month later...

It's funny how sometimes the events can make it look like something is pulling the strings, but it happens that version 1.3 of the SwfObject plugin was released on 26th of September. Just one month later I released the 1.4 version that made it possible to use it with any site offering the typical <object> or <embed> code.

And now, exactly one month later another version is ready.

This one is even easier to install, now you only have to install this plugin and add the line to load it in your fckconfig.js file. The swfobject libreary will be loaded by default from the Google hosted servers. You can read about it in the SwfObject wiki: http://code.google.com/p/swfobject/wiki/hosted_library

Of course, you can keep on using your own hosted version, nothing has changed about that.

The other changes are related to people trying to paste videos. Well it turns out that even easy is not enough for some of them, and instead of trying to paste the code marked as "copy this video to embed this video" they want to paste the url of the page.

Ok, no problem, now some of those servers are automatically detected (YouTube, GoogleVideo, MetaCafe and the new MTV music). It's very easy to add new urls, but I don't wanna waste the time with it, there are too many sites around, and that people should learn to copy the correct code ;-)

Lastly a CDATA wrapper has been added to make those ones using XHTML pass validation.

The demo and download page are still the same: http://martinezdelizarrondo.com/swfobject/