Google Maps 5.5 for Android: Easier Check-ins and rating places

We’ve made it easier to check in and out of places, rate various locations, and get transit information with Google Maps 5.5 for Android. This release adds ‘check in’ and ‘rate and review’ buttons to Place pages, the option to edit your home/work address for Latitude, and redesigned transit station pages.

Read below for more details about the new features, which we hope will improve your user experience, a topic we take very seriously as there are now more than 200 million users of Google Maps for mobile across platforms and devices worldwide.

New check-in and rating buttons added to Place pages

Now when you open a Place page from your mobile device, you can check in to places with Google Latitude or submit a rating or review by clicking on two new buttons at the top of the listing.


This past week I had the chance to explore the Computer History Museum during my visit to San Francisco from across the pond in London. Once nearby, I could quickly open the museum’s Place page and check in.

When I was ready to leave and head to lunch, in a few seconds I could go back to the Place page and rate the museum – which certainly earned the 5 star rating it received from me.

Update home and work address for your Latitude Location History

Last month we released the Location History dashboard for Latitude which estimates how much time you spend at home, work, and everywhere else. If your home or work address changes, or you’d rather set a different address to represent ‘home’ and ‘work,’ you can now edit these addresses within Latitude.

Change home/work location from Location History dashboard

View the redesigned transit station pages

It’s been about two years since we added transit directions in Google Maps for Android. Since then, we’ve increased the coverage from 250 cities to more than 440 and counting – the most recent being Washington, D.C. To make it easier to plan your transit route, we updated the transit station pages in this release to better organize the information you need.

Each page now includes a list of upcoming scheduled departures for different lines, all the transit lines serving the station, and links to nearby transit stations.


Download Google Maps 5.5 for Android here to try out the new check-in and rating buttons, update your Latitude Location History home/work address, check out a transit station in a nearby city, or just make sure you have the latest version of Google Maps for Android. This update requires an Android OS 1.6+ device anywhere Google Maps is currently available. Learn more in our help center.

Bueller on Reflection and Life

 

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

–Ferris Bueller

American student

from the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)

 

Monday is Memorial Day in the U.S. – a day to pay tribute to the individuals who made the ultimate sacrifice in service to the United States.

It was first established on a national level in 1868 (3 years after the Civil War) and became a federal holiday in 1971.

In 1950, the Congress, by a joint resolution, approved a request to the president to issue a proclamation calling on the people of the United States to observe each Memorial Day as a day of prayer for permanent peace and designating a period on that day when the people might unite in prayer – 11 am local time.

Also, Congress designated 3 pm local time as a time for all Americans to observe the National Moment of Remembrance (1 minute of silence… lights on if you’re driving) to remember and honor those who died in service to the United States.

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Bing Maps controls enhance property search experience

John L. Scott Real Estate has been partnering with Microsoft on mapping projects for nearly eight years. In fact, we were one of the first real estate companies to offer map-based home searching way back in 2003. With Neighborhood Wizard™, released in 2007, we became the first residential real estate company in the nation to utilize the Microsoft polygon drawing technology to allow consumers to draw the exact boundaries of their desired search. In 2009 we released JLSConnect™, a customized Silverlight-based tool that we’ve continued to develop for the past two years.


JLSConnect™ has come a long way, and we’re pleased with how the map search product now maximizes the benefits of the Bing Silverlight Map Control. While we’ve included a few screen shots of the product below, feel free to explore the product on our webpage to get a better look.

The combination of Microsoft Silverlight and Deep Zoom technologies, along with John L. Scott’s search technology, make the searching experience very smooth. With this update, customers can now specify all the same criteria they can on our AJAX-based map: property type, price range, beds and baths, etc. They can also filter their results to highlight upcoming open houses or pending and sold properties.

We’ve also made the product more powerful by adding the ability for customers to modify the shape of their search polygon. Customers can now add, move, and remove the points that make up their polygon, giving viewers unprecedented flexibility.

In addition to updating our JLSConnect™ to maximize the benefits of the Silverlight Map Control, we’ve also finished refactoring our AJAX-based interactive map search to use the new AJAX 7.0 Control. Due to the Control’s increased performance, we’ve been able to expand the maximum results to 500 properties.

And with the new seamless transitions between each map type, we now support polygons all the way down to Bird’s eye.

These are only a few of the updates we’ve made to our search tools. Please stop by JohnLScott.com to see how we took full advantage of the Silverlight and AJAX 7.0 controls.