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- Google Earth is more powerful – it has far more features than Google Maps. Here's a simple example: You can't zoom out to a globe view in Google Maps; it stays a flat map and will not resolve into a globe...unless you shift from the street map view into the satellite view. This leads to my second complaint...
- The interface for Google Maps is not great, or at least it's not great for our purposes (building and manipulating datasets). While I have my complaints about the interface of Google Earth, with just one or two key understandings, it's fine; you can do what you want to do. Google Maps, on the other hand, routinely hides its functions depending upon which particular mode you are in. (Then again: I'm over 40. Maybe I'm just too old to find the mobile-optimized interface intuitive. Please tell me if you find it to be useful / powerful / intuitive.)
- The interface for Google Earth is more stable – the Search box, the Places box, the Layers box, the geospace. New tools have been added, but the basic interface is the same. Google Maps, on the other hand, changes as the mobile landscape changes, since the company wants to optimize it for use on phones and tablets.
Banging around in Google Maps
This is all more complicated than I would like, so I'll demo this through a video. I will identify the key steps, however, via text.
If you want to explore Google Maps as a tool for your project work, the key step is getting into the "My Maps" feature; to get into the "My Maps" feature, you first need a Google account.
Once you are in "My Maps", you can create a new map, which is one or more layers, with each layer containing one or more markup items.