VE Team's profileVirtual Earth / Live Map...PhotosBlogListsMore  |  Tools Help |
|
May 24 Major Update to Live Local ships!The final bits of our latest release are just about done flowing from our staging servers to our Live site. If you are actually awake and reading this, be one of the first to check out the biggest release yet of Windows Live Local. Its been a real long day, so I'm not gonna list all of the new feature here right now, but I'll follow on tomorrow with some feature drill downs. Here's a few links to get you started.
Real Time traffic flow
Somes sites today try to visualize traffic as points on map. This is ok, but difficult to really use. you need to study the dots and piece together in your head what traffic is really doing. Traffic flow maps on the other hand color the road segments based on actual real-time traffic conditions. At a glance, you can see what traffic is like in your hood. We've implemted this for over 30 major metros in this release. I fyou turn on the Traffic layer, then zoom into your city you can create a permalink and bookmark it, then return to it whenever you need to check on traffic. here is one for Chicago.
Birds Eye in the UK
We've been busy working with our flight partners around the world to gather the same high quality, low elevation fly over imagery that we have in the United States. Here is a Collection of some of the cites we have covered. More are coming in the UK, as well as other Countries soon TBA.
Lots of New maps
We've introduced street maps, geocoding, and directions all over the world. I'll post a full geo-coverage tomorrow. for now, try out a route from Paris to Kyiv.
Collections!
Feedback from our users in our last release was that they loved the Scratchpad, but wanted more. Bigger lists, multiple lists, permanent storage, sharing... We've done all of that and more. In this release, you can sign in with your Passport or LiveID to create permanent Collections of stuff. you can have as many of these Collections as you want. They can be Private (for your eyes only) or Public (visible to anyone on the net). You can attach photos and web links to items in your collection as well. Here's a Collection of stuff to do in Oahu. or Reviews of Ski resorts in the North West. The screenshot below shows what happens when you mash up WashDot Traffic cams with WLL Traffic. Here's a permalink to try it out yourself! You get the idea - really no limits to what you can collect and share. Check out Pass The POI for an ever growing list of public Collections.
New API and Map Control
We've jammed an absolutely sick amount of features in the new API for developers. Support for Collections, geocoding, routing, GeoRSS feeds, Yellow page searching, international support, Interactive SDK... Alex has a lot more details on his blog.
That's not even all of the big-rock features in this release, let alone the enhancements. I promise more tomorrow, but for now i'm to dreamy land. In the meanwhile lots of blogs and online pubs have great coverage of the release. Check out Michael Arrington on TechCrunch and Elinor Mills on Cnet/news.com.
Comments (25)
VE Team
has turned off comments on this page.
Trackbacks (7)The trackback URL for this entry is: http://virtualearth.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2BBC66E99FDCDB98!1415.trak Weblogs that reference this entry
|
|
|
