While I suppose that eventually everyone will have a broadband connection it will still take many years and even then, there will always be occasional network slow-downs. If the recent evolution of Safari is any indication, it is going to become more and more painful to use Mac OS X over a dial-up connection, regardless of the actual contents of the sites we are actually trying to browse and view. It’s bad enough that more and more sites are more or less requiring a high bandwidth connection. Apple doesn’t have to add its own unjustified requirements to the mix.

One of the most exciting things I’ve seen at Yahoo! since starting here has finally been made public: the new Yahoo Maps. The map application itself differs from many other recent map sites in being rendered entirely in Flash. This leaves far more scope for interface niceties, but doesn’t it reduce the scope for hacking that made things like Google Maps so much fun?

Not at all. The maps team have produced a set of APIs that should make any geo-hacker very happy indeed. Take a look at these, all launched today: