Google Maps has a wonderful new API, officially sanctioning (and encouraging) the hackery that has been going on non-stop since they debuted. My first attempt at a useful hack using their official API is this: Google Maps Transparencies. It's two maps overlayed on top of each other (Map and Satellite view, or vice-versa), with the topmost map being slightly transparent, so you can see the interesting intersections between Google's Road Map data and the real world Satellite imagery.

For the time-being, it's US-centric, since their API doesn't provide a simple interface to their lovely single search box (you have to enter latitude and longitude), and to simplify things, I just included a giant drop-down of US cities. You could always zoom way out and pan to get to the UK (or Canada).

Update [07/06/05]: I've fixed a bug or two, (including Safari not working), added drop-down lists of UK and Canada cities (effectively covering what Google maps covers now), added a way for people to enter their own Lat/Lon, and a way to make a permalink to a page. Whew. Thanks for the feedback everyone.

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