Imagine honing in on familiar areas simply by typing the first few digits of a zip code—type “9” to immediately zoom into the US west coast, followed by “4” to zoom into the SF bay area and then “5” for the east bay. Because of the immediate feedback, the user can stop typing when she gets close enough, and use relative navigation from there.
This is really cool, but ultimately not that practical because it doesn't display the zipcode boundaries.
If it were integrated with zipcode boundary information as this [ http://www.usnaviguide.com/zip.htm ] site does with google maps, it would be pretty awesome.
Interesting idea. I didn't really try too hard making it a complete product, since I was only interested in proving the navigation concept that Bret Victor had described. But that's a good idea, and if you're interested feel free to fork it and add that capability!
I had the same concern when I built it, but the data source I was using only provides centroid information, not boundaries. I thought for a while trying to come up with a solution and ended up ignoring it, since I was mainly interested in a proof of concept. If you'd like to fork it and improve you're more than welcome to!
Imagine honing in on familiar areas simply by typing the first few digits of a zip code—type “9” to immediately zoom into the US west coast, followed by “4” to zoom into the SF bay area and then “5” for the east bay. Because of the immediate feedback, the user can stop typing when she gets close enough, and use relative navigation from there.
I coded up an example a little while ago (http://andrewcou.ch/zip-to-it/).