I love the drag-two-fingers-on-the-trackpad-to-scroll feature of my Mac Book Pro — it’s been a sneak preview of the multitouch user interface on the iPhone, very natural and convenient. But I’m always surprised at what happens when I use it in Google Maps — the map zooms instead of scrolling. The zoom operation is fairly slow, and there’s no quick way to undo it, so I feel frustrated every time this happens.
No doubt when Google first mapped mouse scroll wheels to the zoom feature it seemed like a clever trick: scrolling was already handled by click and drag, and this way you could adjust the zoom without moving the mouse. But the trackpad scrolling gesture — click and drag with two fingers — does not feel like a zoom, it feels like a scroll, and it is a scroll everywhere else in the UI.
Fortunately, finger dragging works as expected in Google Maps on the iPhone (with one finger or two). As more people become familiar with multitouch interfaces, on the iPhone and other devices, I expect that more people will stumble on the maps.google.com zoom feature, and perhaps Google will reconsider it.
Posted by Jim Matthews 