Zmarties

Ancient maps would show the known area at some level of detail, but outside that the mapmakers would exercise their imagination - often displaying dragons and other fanciful creatures.

I note that Google Maps has changed its behaviour if you scroll outside the known universe - namely the North American continent. Previously it used to show the wide blue sea stretching ad infinitum, but now it shows an empty grey for these areas instead.

There have been a number of other visual changes:

• the examples on the home page have been changed to be much simpler, and not to confusingly look like search boxes (Peter Merholtz has a screen shot of how it used to look)

Underlying this, the javascript engine driving the UI has been updated to maps.3.js which breaks a number of bookmarklets including my own Latitude and Longitude.