This one's mainly for Internet Explorer 9 users: When you first load the Rough Guides' A Rough Guide To The World, you find yourself staring at a map -- it's divided into many many tiny little squares, and each one has a spinner.
After a short while, the spinners start disappearing, replaced by tiny thumbnails. Click on a thumbnail, and get a beautiful Creative-Commons photo of that location, courtesy of Flickr. You will often get much more than one photo -- sometimes even thousands. The tool includes a nice way of browsing them all, in a sort of internal gallery.
The initial thumbnails are tiny, so you can zoom in on whatever part of the globe you find interesting. But there's a more interesting way to get a closer look: a loupe that you can drag around to look at the map. There's a beautiful effect showing the thumbnails enlarged through the loupe (they're kind of distorted), but more importantly, the loupe lets you filter the thumbnails: You can filter by "experience type" (think "Eating", "Shopping", "Festivals"), see all places included as "Experiences" (which contain a bit more detail), or show everything. There's also an option to show a "Rough Guides Map" but it's not very clear - I couldn't figure out exactly what this does.
The whole thing is HTML5 and feels incredibly slick. It's a promotional piece both for IE9 and the Rough Guides series, but it does work on other browsers -- and I wish all marketing would be this beautiful and useful.
After the fold you can watch a short video tour.
A Rough Guide To The World showcases our beautiful planet and IE9 hardware acceleration originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 01 Nov 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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