My group has 4 players on laptops, and we were talking about how cool it'd be to use digital maps. So I got to thinking, and I've been messing around with Bing Maps and Google Maps seeing what I could do with them, and I like what I can do with their maps.
It'd be awesome to have the entire table looking at the same map with gang territories overlaid and patrol routes, throwing out points for sniper nests and planning heists. But is it too gimmicky?

I've also been looking into getting building plans and blueprints of random buildings, and using them during missions to make planning and combats smoother.

Are there gaming aids that people find really add to the fun of planning (and running) missions, and/or enhance the atmosphere?

Play in a room with a television (preferably an HDTV) and connect your GM laptop to it via S-Video or HDMI.

This works best if you can also see the TV set clearly from where you sit as Game Master. That way, you can use the TV as an external monitor (instead of cloning the contents of the desktop) and should have no problem running it at it's full resolution (either 1280x720 or 1920x1080 - few laptop screens run at either of these) and can avoid letting other players seeing what's running on your main display (usually cat-girl pr0n).

Convert any maps (floorplans work really well) or graphics that you're using to PDF files, then fire up Adobe Acrobat (Pro?) and open them up. You can use Acrobat's pen feature to easily mark (and erase or move around) where certain things are, like the replay video feed from a football game.

Play in a location that has an Internet connection. Have all your players download a chat service like Trillian, and use that to communicate with them individually for instances in which you need something said to one player (but not the whole group). Likewise, the players can use that to interact with one another individually or in group-based chat.

You may or may not find useful the stuff I've made for playing on my laptop:

SR4 HTML Reference (work in progress)
SR4 Fillable PDF Character Sheet

Here's a sweet map of Seattle I found recently.

http://www.1w6.de/rpg/sr/map/

Lots of gangs, locations, area ratings, hospitals, bars, etc. mapped.

-DrZaius

O SHEYT

Durnit. This map is amazing, but I want to be able to zoom in more. I'd try to contact the people who run the site, but they're in Germany.

Yeah that's the problem. You can click on most of the dots, but at a certain point you can't zoom in anymore. It's very useful for locating Hospitals and determining what rating an area is, but it's probably not great for mapping every corp facility a team is going to run across.

-DrZaius

I use google maps and photoshop. I have different shapes on layers than I can move around the map in order to represent players/npc's/vehicles.
I really do prefer this mapping application that I wrote in php that lets the user click around the map and move only their point. The GM can hide and show points of npc's.

I use the screen share of skype and omnihedron in order to handle dice rolls with my friend in another city. It's also great to use the messaging feature to give specific info/texting like a runner would receive.

I really wish that I could use the smartboard at work to output to screens for them.

Streetview was really great for bringing the scene to life.

I've used a whiteboard app called Dabbleboard for forum games. I could see an app like this being useful with your group, each having laptops.

You can use the whiteboard and import say a grid of hexes and then draw on it. It allows you to save images, so you could create a bunch of player "tokens", similar to a complex app like rptools. Dabbleboard is really easy though. You could easily import a background image (granted, you'd have to create that someplace else) and put your tokens on the board and start playing.

Each player could log into the Dabbleboard and move their own token when its their turn.

There are better programs out there, but this one is really easy to use and while you don't have layers or fog of war, for a quick startup, it is really nice.