A tribute to Bob Moog

In the mid-1960s, Dr. Robert Moog unleashed a new universe of sounds into musicdom with his invention of the electronic analog Moog Synthesizer. The timbre and tones of these keyboard instruments (true works of art in and of themselves) would come to define a generation of music, featuring heavily in songs by The Beatles, The Doors, Stevie Wonder, Kraftwerk and many others.

When people hear the word “synthesizer” they often think “synthetic”—fake, manufactured, unnatural. In contrast, Bob Moog’s synthesizers produce beautiful, organic and rich sounds that are, nearly 50 years later, regarded by many professional musicians as the epitome of an electronic instrument. “Synthesizer,” it turns out, refers to the synthesis embedded in Moog’s instruments: a network of electronic components working together to create a whole greater than the sum of the parts.

With his passion for high-tech toolmaking in the service of creativity, Bob Moog is something of a patron saint of the nerdy arts and a hero to many of us here. So for the next 24 hours on our homepage, you’ll find an interactive, playable logo inspired by the instruments with which Moog brought musical performance into the electronic age. You can use your mouse or computer keyboard to control the mini-synthesizer’s keys and knobs to make nearly limitless sounds. Keeping with the theme of 1960s music technology, we’ve patched the keyboard into a 4-track tape recorder so you can record, play back and share songs via short links or Google+.

Much like the musical machines Bob Moog created, this doodle was synthesized from a number of smaller components to form a unique instrument. When experienced with Google Chrome, sound is generated natively using the Web Audio API—a doodle first (for other browsers the Flash plugin is used). This doodle also takes advantage of JavaScript, Closure libraries, CSS3 and tools like Google Web Fonts, the Google+ API, the Google URL Shortener and App Engine.

Special thanks to engineers Reinaldo Aguiar and Rui Lopes and doodle team lead Ryan Germick for their work, as well as the Bob Moog Foundation and Moog Music for their blessing. Now give those knobs a spin and compose a tune that would make Dr. Moog smile!

The New Bing Maps Features

 

Coming back after the holiday season with a lot of energy, the Bing Maps team kicked off 2012 with releases of a new routing engine and the WPF control. Today–only 2 weeks later–we are now announcing several new features in the Bing Spatial Data Services and the Bing Maps Account Center. New features include a data source for traffic incidents, the ability to find points of interest (POI) along a route, wildcard-searches in your POI, incremental updates of POI data sources, improved reporting and more. Happy New Year! Are you feeling the love? Smile

The Bing Spatial Data Services provide a REST interface that allows you to geocode or reverse-geocode your own POI data sources in batch-mode, manage these data sources and query your own or some public POI data sources that Bing Maps provides in a spatial context.

Finding Traffic Incidents Along a Route using the new Spatial Data Services Query

In this release, we added the following features:

  1. Incremental Upload – Your own data sources now support incremental updates by setting the parameter ‘loadOperation’ in the Data Source Management API to ‘incremental’. So, once you’ve uploaded a data source of X number of locations into the Spatial Data Service, if you just want to add a few records you can just send those few records. We’ll handle the add and update functions for you!
  2. Wildcard Searches – New Query Options support wildcard searches through filter criteria. Let’s say you want to query your data source to find the nearest locations around a point AND you want to filter the results based on the beginning or end of a keyword. For example, let’s say you have a “Store Manager” field in your data source. You can look for said manager by last name, “%Smith” or first name “John%” so you get all the Smiths or Johns within a region.
  3. Traffic Incidents – Traffic Incidents for North America are now available as a public POI data source and can be accessed through the Query API. Now the traffic incidents you see on Bing Maps are available to you in your applications via a spatial query.
  4. Find Near Route – The Bing Spatial Data Service supports now an additional spatialFilter which allows you to search for POI along a route. This is a game changer. Let’s say you’re a coffee company and you want to empower your users to have the ability find all your locations along their drive from, say Seattle to San Francisco…now you can! The Find Near Route Feature allows you to spatially query the points you’ve uploaded into SDS within a 1 mile buffer of your route.

http:// spatial.virtualearth.net /REST/v1/data/
439698230d90496596083f3fe7aafeb2/
TrafficIncidents/
TrafficIncident
?key=[YOUR_BING_MAPS_KEY]
&$format=json
&jsonp=callbackFindTrafficIncidentsNearRoute
&spatialFilter=nearRoute(‘47.678558349609375,-122.13098907470703’,
‘47.60356140136719,-122.32943725585937’)

You will find a complete sample using the Bing Maps AJAX Control version 7 for visualization, the DirectionsManager class for driving directions, the TrafficLayer class for traffic-flow information and the Bing Spatial Data Services for traffic-incident information along a route here. Alternate versions of the SDK are available in PDF and .chm format, as well.

Note: Neither the Wildcard-search nor the spatial-filter ‘nearRoute’ are supported with the public data sources NAVTEQNA and NAVTEQEU.

The Bing Maps Account Center is the portal through which you can find information for development with Bing Maps, and also manage your account. It contains links to interactive and traditional SDKs, a facility to generate Bing Maps Keys, a web user interface to manage your own POI data sources and a reporting service through which you can retrieve statistics about your Bing Maps usage.

In this latest release we added the following features.

  1. Additional data validation has been introduced for the upload of your own POI data sources.
  2. Before it was already possible to add and edit records in a data source that you uploaded through the portal. You can now also download and delete data sources.M32small
  3. Image capturing adds now additional security during the generation of Bing Maps Keys.M33small
  4. Additional reports have been added to provide more details on the use of specific Bing Maps Keys.M34small

We certainly hope you’re feeling special (and spatial!). We’re investing quite a bit of energy into Bing Maps and hope to see some killer apps.

Keep Google Earth and Google Maps accurate with the improved Map Maker

Over three years ago, Google introduced “Map Maker” to allow people to make updates to Google Maps and Google Earth. You could mark businesses as being closed, move their pins around, edit information, add roads, etc. It’s quite a useful tool.

Now Google has updated Map Maker to make it even more powerful and easy to use.

map-maker.jpg

Not only will your updates appear on Google Maps and Google Earth (after they’re approved by a Google staff member), but they’ll also appear on Google Maps Mobile — and that’s very important. With the growing popularity of Google Navigation on Android, accurate maps are a necessity. This also shows why Google Navigation is so wildly popular; rather than getting yearly updates (for $99) like a Garmin device, you get access to maps that are updated daily for free!