|
|
Spaces home Virtual Earth / Live Map...PhotosProfileFriends | Tools |
April 03
New Version of Live Search Maps Launches!Note - I updated this post to reflect the proper name for the website - Live Search Maps. I had been incorrectly referring to the website as Live Maps in my blog posts. Sorry about any confusion I may have caused. This afternoon a new release of Live Search Maps was launched, the sixth major rev since July 7, 2005 when V1 went out. Among the new feature items are a bunch of bug fixes, performance improvements and enhancements to existing functionality. For some of the big items, like GeoRSS publishing of Collections, I’ll have separate blog posts this week to drill in on details. In the meanwhile, here is a list of all of the new and improved features to get you started. Firefox support for 3D mapping The Space Navigator from 3D Connexion is also supported now in 3D view. Space Navigator is an innovative input device optimized for moving around in 3d virtual spaces. As always, Virtual Earth also supports any game controller that works with DirectX, such as the USB XBOX controller you probably have sitting around the house :-) Ratings and Reviews of Business Listings and Details page enhancements The Ratings and Reviews features are currently only available in the US market. Also on the Details page for a business, you will see suggested 'Find Nearby' follow up queries based on the business you are looking at. These suggested Yellow page queries show a preview of how many results for each category are available in your search area. Subscribe to a Collection via RSS. RSS is a family of standard formats used to publish frequently updated content, such as blogs or news feeds. You can now subscribe to an RSS feed for a Collection so that you can be kept up to date as the author of the Collection adds new items. When you subscribe to a Collection’s feed, your RSS reader automatically receives updates as the author makes changes. For instance, if someone sends you a link to a Collection of their favorite Italian restaurants in your city, you may want to subscribe to the Collection’s feed to be kept up to date as the author adds more restaurants. There are many good RSS readers available – some run in a web browser while others are applications that run on your PC. Live.com has very good RSS viewing built right in. In this screenshot to the right, you are looking at someone’s collection of favorite restaurants in Seattle. If this is of interest to you, you can subscribe by clicking the Subscribe link or RSS icon and adding the feed to your favorite RSS reader. For the example Collection shown here, here is the normal permalink to view it in a web browser, and here is its RSS feed to add it to your favorite news reader. Live Search Maps is now a GeoRSS publishing tool as well! Collection feeds are GeoRSS compatible, meaning that they have special markup to encode the geographic information about each item in your collection into the feed. RSS readers that don’t understand this added information will gracefully ignore it, while Geo-enhanced feed consumers can us this information to present the feed on a map. This element of the feature is of great interest to application developers who use RSS as a means to pipe data from one application to another. Collection data can now be easily accessed programmatically and consumed by any application that can parse and consume RSS/XML. Yahoo's Pipes, The Virtual Earth Map Control, and as of recently Google Maps are all good consumers of GeoRSS. The addition of the Geo information opens up a wide range of possibilities for developers. For application developers interested in learning more about GeoRSS, I suggest starting at GeoRSS.org. Mikel Maron, a key contributor to the shaping of the GeoRSS standard, maintains the Brainoff blog and is another good source of developer info. I'll follow up this week with a much more detailed post about GeoRSS and how to take advantage of this great new feature in Live Search Maps. Area Calculations and Drawing Enhancements While you are drawing your lines and shapes, if you reach the edge of the map it will smoothly scroll for you to make it easy to keep drawing without reaching for the keyboard. The cursor keys will pan the map during drawing as well, but most users find it more convenient to have the map scrolled automatically . Drag n’ drop re-ordering of items on the Scratchpad. You can now hover over an item on the scratchpad and a mini toolbar will appear on the item. Grab the drag handle in the toolbar and drag the item to a new position in the list. If you need to move the item far in the list, it will auto-scroll for you when you reach the edge. This is a big convenience if you are managing a large collection and need to move a new item from its default location at the end of the collection up to the top of the list. If for instance you are maintaining a Collection of your top 50 favorite live music venues and want to move a new entry from its default position at the end of the list up to the top, this is now a snap.
Traffic and Driving Directions Enhancements Address-Only Geocoding Live Search Maps for Outlook is Updated
Note for Developers We hope you enjoy using this new release. Stay tuned here over the next few days for more in depth information on these features. As always, your feedback is most welcome - the team here is always listening and acting on your requests and bug reports.
Technorati tags: Virtual Earth, Live Maps
Add a commentTrackbacks
The trackback URL for this entry is:
http://virtualearth.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2BBC66E99FDCDB98!8495.trak
Weblogs that reference this entry
|
|