Puzzlepieces – tag ‘microsoft’

Virtual Earth / Live Maps: The New Release of Live Maps and Virtual Earth 3D is now Live! - when I was studying for exams this past week, Live Maps, the team I worked with and will be returning to in August, released a major upgrade. Here is what is cool to me, although there is a lot more.

• labels on “birds-eye” (oblique) imagery - this is actually very complex to do, from a technical standpoint, but it makes the imagery much more useful
• MapCruncher integration. I have played with MapCruncher a lot, it is an amazingly useful tool for putting raster/PDF maps onto modern web maps, and I have shown it off to a lot of people
• better viewing (and RSS feeds!) for user-added items everywhere
• improved display of KML files, which is especially important, as KML 2.2 is now an OGC standard geographic data format
• walking directions - people who know me in person know that driving directions aren’t very useful to me. Unfortunately, walking directions isn’t on Live Maps now, but it has been added to the API. So far it only uses a subset of the road network, no foot paths, parks, etc., so hopefully that will be improved upon

Popfly - I heard about this first though email, but it’s all over the web as well. Microsoft has done an amazing job of making it really easy to combine web services, and I only hope that the output itself (something in an iframe?) is just as web malleable as the services it uses.

DeWitt Clinton » Blog Archive » What a day!

Microsoft is supporting OpenID and Apple is denouncing DRM.

no comment by me is even needed here

MapCruncher turns static images into tiles suitable for use with Microsoft Virtual Earth (Windows Live Local), and presumably other tile-based mapping applications too. Very neat and useful, the existing hacks I’d seen to handle this on Google’s map API were relatively poor. Via VE blog.

I’m leaving tomorrow morning for Seattle and returning back to Waterloo Friday night. I can’t think of anyone I know online who lives there, but if I’m mistaken let me know and I’ll see if we can meet up.

Should be fun, it’s my first time there. I’ll probably take quite a few photos

argggh!

brought about by watching the channel9 video on Microsoft and RSS, but it’s a general comment, not directed at microsoft