Let your Google Maps tags move: The wonderful uses of CSS animations

The Google Maps API provides convenient tools for web developers, but its map markings are lacking in flexibility and creativity. This article will demonstrate how to combine CSS and JavaScript to create animated map markers that respond to user interactions, making your map more vivid and interesting.

Core points:

• The Google Maps API is powerful, but the built-in map markers lack flexibility. Through the clever combination of CSS and JavaScript, we can create animation markers that are more interactive and visually appealing.
• The key steps to implement animation tags include: adding a tag image, setting optimized: false to render each tag as an independent DOM element, creating OverlayView to organize all tags, and finally using CSS to animation.
• In order to better control mark animations, we can add external toggles, add animations for user interactions such as clicks or hover, and even apply different animation effects to different types of marks to improve the user experience.

The Google Maps API creates an excellent user experience with just a few lines of code with its powerful built-in functions. However, it has a clear shortcoming in customizing map markers: lack of flexibility and creativity.

While you can add custom marker images, tooltips, and tags, these are static, textual interactions that appear cluttered when there are many marking points on the map. There is currently no standard way to create interactive tags that respond to user actions.

To solve this problem, I explored a way to create truly unique maps, i.e. add CSS3 animations to your map marks and let them jump, rotate, or hide to enhance the visuals.

When the user hovers over the mark, click on the mark, or use the toggle button outside the map, you can use any CSS animation to make the mark move. This guide will focus on a simple strategy that you can apply to any project. (The two examples of Ryan Connolly and Felipe Figueroa use a similar approach.)

The following is a simple example of an animation marker. The famous Cheshire Cat is a marker for three different locations in Massachusetts, you can change its animation using the toggle button in the upper right corner:

CodePen sample link

Basic steps:

The following steps will guide you to add CSS animation function to the map mark:

Step 1: Add a tagged image

Specify your image with the following code:

var catIcon = {
    url: myImageURLhere,
    size: new google.maps.Size(70, 60),
    scaledSize: new google.maps.Size(70, 60),
    origin: new google.maps.Point(0,0)
};

Step 2: Set optimized: false

This allows you to render each marker as an independent DOM element:

var catIcon = {
    url: myImageURLhere,
    size: new google.maps.Size(70, 60),
    scaledSize: new google.maps.Size(70, 60),
    origin: new google.maps.Point(0,0)
};

步驟3：創(chuàng)建OverlayView

This will organize all the markers in one panel so that you can access them from the DOM:

var marker = new google.maps.Marker({
    position: latLng,
    map: map,
    icon: catIcon,
    optimized: false
});

In the getPanes() line, you can assign an ID to the tag layer to use it in CSS. This OverlayView will automatically collect any markers that are not in other layers. In this case, there are no other layers, so it collects all the markers.

Step 4: Add animation using CSS

This can be a one-time animation or a continuous animation:

var myoverlay = new google.maps.OverlayView();
myoverlay.draw = function() {
    this.getPanes().markerLayer.id = 'markerLayer';
};
myoverlay.setMap(map);

靈活選項(xiàng)：

The above steps will immediately animate all markers. Here are some more finer ways to control animation markup:

• External Switch: Using the jQuery .click() handler, you can easily control the display and hide of animations, or change the animation effects of different tags.

• Click/Hoover: By creating a global array to store all tags and adding a unique title attribute to each tag, you can animate the click and hover events.

• Different animations of different marker types: Use the CSS selector to apply different animations to different types of markers according to the src attribute of the marker image.

Summary:

As a developer or designer, your main goal is to create products that users like. Users have been exposed to many Google Maps products, and it is time to make your map stand out!

You can use map mark animation to improve user experience by using the following methods:

• For marker images similar to real moving objects (such as cats), they can be added with CSS animations corresponding to natural motion.
• For marker images (such as stores) that do not have traditional mobility, an animation that makes it appear to react to user clicks, such as jumps or jitters.
• If your data corresponds to each tag, you can make the tag react based on the data. For example, for a busy intersection, a flashing exclamation mark can be added above it.

Try it and wait for the users to praise your work!

FAQs:

(The FAQs content provided in the original text should be added here, and corresponding pseudo-original rewrites should be carried out to maintain the consistency of the content and avoid duplication.)

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