Map Reset Link

[Anonymous]

• If someone intends to scroll down a page using the mouse wheel and the map size is large, there is a high probability that the mouse pointer will be over the map and the map will zoom instead of the page scrolling. The map zoom change is typically huge, the user doesn’t see the intended map view and they are lost or confused by a large number of map markers where they should be seeing one or very few.
• Even with a small map size, if the mouse pointer happens to be over the map, the map will change instead of the page scrolling. The change is typically huge, the user doesn’t see what was intended to be shown and they can be lost or confused.
• In applications spanning large geographical areas there can be multiple clusters of closely-spaced map markers, for example, where there are many closely-spaced locations within each of several widely-spaced cities. In such applications, a user who zooms and/or moves the map can become lost and not know how to restore the original view.

Any of those problems can be fixed by reloading the webpage, but some users don’t realize that. Even where they do, reloading the page can take significantly more time than repainting the map would, depending on other page content, server workload, internet bandwidth, and other factors. How much trouble would it be to add a small “Reset Map” text link centered above each map?

[Anonymous]

A better solution to this extremely annoying problem is to disable mouse scroll-wheel zooming when the mouse pointer is over a Google map. That can be done very easily with Google Maps API V3 by simply setting ‘scrollwheel: false’ in ‘myOptions’. I did that as follows:

In ’eme_location_map.js_with_infobox’:

Line 673 insert ‘scrollwheel: false,’ above ‘disableDoubleClickZoom: true,’.

In ’eme_location_map.js’:

Line 165 insert ‘scrollwheel: false,’ above ‘disableDoubleClickZoom: true,’.

Line 33 insert ‘scrollwheel: false,’ above ‘disableDoubleClickZoom: true,’.

I am not the only one annoyed by Google’s default map scroll-wheel zooming “feature.” This is one example http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/maps/thread?tid=47a90d8552ac6f0a&hl=en of many discussion threads complaining about it. However, note that the solution provided near the bottom of that page doesn’t work with Google Maps API V3.

[Franky]

Well, I know about the scrolling wheel thingie, I activated it 🙂

There’s no easy way for now to do a “reset map”, the google api doesn’t provide it …

[Anonymous]

Map reset is not so important with scroll-wheel zooming disabled, but I have posted a working example of a reset button added to a Google Maps API v3 map. You can see how it is being done in the source.

http://www.tigertek.net/google-map-reset.html

[Franky]

Yeah, ain’t going to happen that way 🙂

Creating a button on your own, placing it carefully where it should be using CSS and giving it the look-n-feel of google map buttons is not the way to go I believe. I don’t want to have to consider all possibilities of other CSS codes, of other sizing of maps etc … and if you have more than one map on your page it also needs adjusting.

For now I will leave this as it is: I don’t find a satisfying solution for this and I like the scrolling using the mouse wheel.

[Franky]

scroll-wheel can be disabled now (merge of your and my code).

[Anonymous]

The merged code has been tested and is working fine in the trunk version.

[Author]

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