It’s been not even 2 weeks since we released the latest rev of Live Local, and feedback so far has been really good. Online tech publications like CNET and ZDnet have been writing about the latest release and even the popular mapping and GIS blogs like SpatiallyAdjusted and Google Earth have been having a look. For good reason all of the coverage seems to focus in on the big ticket additions like real-time traffic overlays, aerial imagery, International mapping, and Collections. But there’s literally dozens of other less sexy improvements that went into this release – most of these driven by direct feedback from our users. It’s these features that help make WLL so good at accomplishing the everyday tasks you come to the site for. I’ll try to have a few posts here this week highlighting some of the lesser talked about, but very important, features.

Let’s start with the ability to move pushpins around to correct Locations.

One of the most frustrating situations in online mapping applications is looking up an address, but having the resulting marker appear down the block a few hundred feet (or more!) from where you know the address really is. Even more frustrating is when you were looking up the address to share it with a friend to give them driving directions or something, and now you KNOW  the address is off by some amount. High resolution aerial imagery makes these errors even more apparent. The error is introduced when the address is algorithmically ‘geocoded, a process that isn’t as precise as going and standing in front of the building with a GPS to capture the precise coordinate of the address.  Now Windows Live Local gives you the ability to interactively correct these locations, before you send them off to a friend or add them to a collection. Lets try it out.

I want to send a friend a map of 221 Baker St, London, United kingdom so we can meet there. WLL does a pretty good job of finding the location, but not quite perfect as you can see here . no worries – just hover over the pushpin and select ‘Move’ in its popup. You can then click anywhere on the map to reposition the pushpin – Like this. You can see I moved the pin to the north of Melcombe street and also edited it to add a note about meeting at noon. HINT – Before choosing the ‘Move’ option, zoom in a click or 2 and switch to aerial view for a better view of where you are moving the pin.

Once you have moved your pin, you can use it as the source or destination of a route, email it to someone, or save it as a new Collection –in all cases your newly assigned location will be maintained. This feature is great for correcting street addresses as we have seen, and it is also very useful for helping refine a location when the street address corresponds to a big area like a college  or corporate campus. An example would be 1 Microsoft way, Redmond, Wa. WLL correctly locates Microsoft’s mailing address, but it’s a huge campus. if I wanted to send this address to a landscaping company to show them where to plant some new trees, I better be more exact than that :-) I can now hover over the pin, select Move, and position it exactly where I want the trees planted. This is a nice compliment to a feature we added to WLL in December – the ability to point at any place on the map, right click, and select ‘Add Pushpin’. Even after creating a pin in this manner, you can always move it later exactly as we did above.

Stay tuned - lots more helpful tips for both developers and users will be posted this week.