A really short and pretty awful look at Bing 3D maps.
Bing Maps: “The Hurricane Season”
The term ‘hurricane season’ recently brought new meaning to many communities across the U.S. East Coast in the wake of Hurricane Irene. Being able to see the latest developments and impacted locations online through Bing Maps makes it possible to better anticipate, respond and recover from the destruction of hurricanes.
Around the world, people use Microsoft technology every day to stay in touch during difficult times. Today, we’re calling out a Bing Maps app launched by the Wall Street Journal that tracks hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean. Tech geek or not, you have to admit this is a useful app, especially now during hurricane season. Let’s take a closer look.
The app is an interactive graphic that charts both current hurricanes as they are happening, and chronicles previous hurricanes dating back to 2005. So if you’ve always wanted to be a weatherman, you can bookmark the link and visit it often to see the latest weather patterns – hurricane season or not. The app is easy to use, so no meteorology degree is required.
To watch a current storm’s path, you can follow it from the moment your browser opens to the app. The storms strength is categorized on the right hand side of the screen so you can see the severity of the storm and the route it is predicted to take. Here, we see an example of a storm pattern that started near the Bahamas as a tropical storm and as it grew stronger it became a Category 5 making its way up through the Gulf of Mexico. As it got closer to the Gulf Coast it became less intense, still remaining a Category 3 and then tapering off back to a tropical storm status.
To see a past hurricane, just click on one of the blue lines and it will take you to the storm’s history and the calendar at the top will move to the month it happened.
With Bing Maps, it’s easy to zoom in and out by scrolling your mouse so you can zoom in to see high-levels of detail or zoom out to see the past patterns of multiple hurricanes in the Atlantic.
For you self-proclaimed geeks, here’s more on how the app was built and all the things it can do:
Bing Maps’ partner, OnTerra built the hurricane tracker working closely with the Wall Street Journal team. It was created using the Bing Maps AJAX7 API, JQuery and JavaScript. It gets data from NOAA which is processed into JSON data files and refreshed every few hours, which includes the hurricane path, predicted path and the cone of uncertainty polygons. The application works great on modern web browsers including iPhone, iPAD, Android and Blackberry devices, unlike Flash and Silverlight applications. The HTML5 support in the AJAX7 API provides solid mobile device integration for interactive mapping apps like the Wall Street Journal Hurricane Tracker.
DataMarket app: Quick, map-based visualization of your data
The Windows Azure DataMarket is a growing repository of data sources and services mediated by Microsoft. It allows customers to purchase vector and tiled datasets using Open Data Protocol (OData) specifications. Available datasets include weather, crime, demographics, parcels, plus many other layers. The OData working group has been looking at full spatial support for this specification; in the meantime, DataMarket datasets can still be used with geospatial applications and Bing Maps.
To further assist use of datasets, we are happy to announce the launch of DataMarket Mapper, a map app that allows quick and easy map-based visualization of DataMarket data. The app was developed by OnTerra Systems, along with the Microsoft DataMarket group. Look for it in the Bing Maps App Gallery. With a DataMarket subscription you can access layers, and visualize these layers on Bing Maps. If lat/longs don’t exist in the data source then the Bing Maps geocoder will geocode on the fly. Even if you don’t have a DataMarket account, we’ve made some crime and demographic data available in the app.
Figure 1 – DataMarket Mapper showing crime statistics per city using Data.gov crime data.
You can also use DataMarket data in Bing Maps applications using Bing Maps AJAX and Silverlight APIs. This involves using the vector shape or tile layer methods. Figure 2 shows parcel tile layer overlay on Bing Maps AJAX 7.0 Control API. If you have a DataMarket key with access to these layers you can also access these demos directly for testing/code samples:
• Alteryx Demographics
• BSI Parcels
• Weatherbug Station Locations
Figure 2 – DataMarket parcel data from B.S.I. shown in a web mapping application using the Bing Maps AJAX 7 API.
We’re excited to launch this new app. After you visit the app and see it in action, we’d enjoy hearing your feedback. We’re already working on updates. In the near future, you’ll see the addition of country-based datasets, Windows Live ID/OAuth, and thematic mapping. If you have any questions or comments or would like help in building a custom Bing Maps application with DataMarket Mapper, please contact OnTerra Systems.com.
Bing Maps controls enhance property search experience
John L. Scott Real Estate has been partnering with Microsoft on mapping projects for nearly eight years. In fact, we were one of the first real estate companies to offer map-based home searching way back in 2003. With Neighborhood Wizard™, released in 2007, we became the first residential real estate company in the nation to utilize the Microsoft polygon drawing technology to allow consumers to draw the exact boundaries of their desired search. In 2009 we released JLSConnect™, a customized Silverlight-based tool that we’ve continued to develop for the past two years.
JLSConnect™ has come a long way, and we’re pleased with how the map search product now maximizes the benefits of the Bing Silverlight Map Control. While we’ve included a few screen shots of the product below, feel free to explore the product on our webpage to get a better look.
The combination of Microsoft Silverlight and Deep Zoom technologies, along with John L. Scott’s search technology, make the searching experience very smooth. With this update, customers can now specify all the same criteria they can on our AJAX-based map: property type, price range, beds and baths, etc. They can also filter their results to highlight upcoming open houses or pending and sold properties.
We’ve also made the product more powerful by adding the ability for customers to modify the shape of their search polygon. Customers can now add, move, and remove the points that make up their polygon, giving viewers unprecedented flexibility.
In addition to updating our JLSConnect™ to maximize the benefits of the Silverlight Map Control, we’ve also finished refactoring our AJAX-based interactive map search to use the new AJAX 7.0 Control. Due to the Control’s increased performance, we’ve been able to expand the maximum results to 500 properties.
And with the new seamless transitions between each map type, we now support polygons all the way down to Bird’s eye.
These are only a few of the updates we’ve made to our search tools. Please stop by JohnLScott.com to see how we took full advantage of the Silverlight and AJAX 7.0 controls.
Bing Maps v7 control -New Version
It seems that, in the last few hours, Microsoft have pushed out a new release of the Bing Maps AJAX control (or, maybe their content delivery network has only just started serving a new version – the timestamp attached to the library URL, http://ecn.dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/v7.0/js/bin/7.0.20110426171249.81/en-us/veapicore.js, suggests that it may have been compiled 10 days ago, on 26th April 2011).
This is a minor release – it’s not version 7.1 – so you wouldn’t normally expect to see much in the way of new features. However, it is significant since it appears to resolve a fairly crippling bug that previously made the map control unusable if instantiated in a container of the page that was not visible on initial load (i.e. if you wanted your map to be absolutely positioned in a div near the bottom of a long page that required the user to scroll to get to it).
There is also at least one change made to the default behaviour of the map, in that panning now exhibits an inertia effect – the map does not abruptly stop when you release the mouse button after panning, but slides to a gradual standstill. This change follows the trend of a lot of previous enhancements to v7, in making the AJAX control behave more like its Silverlight cousin (which has always had optional inertia).
You don’t need to do anything to use the new version – any requests to the v7 library will automatically retrieve the latest version, as follows:
<script src="http://ecn.dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=7.0" type="text/javascript"><!--mce:0--></script>
Of course, you might not want to use the new inertia effect. A quick dig around the code reveals that there is now a useInertia boolean property that can be passed in the mapOptions of the map constructor. To disable the inertia effect, create your map as follows:
map = new Microsoft.Maps.Map(
document.getElementById("divMap"),
{
credentials: "ENTER YOUR KEY",
center: new Microsoft.Maps.Location(54, -2),
zoom: 4,
mapTypeId: Microsoft.Maps.MapTypeId.road,
useInertia: false
}
);
You can also change the intensity of the inertial effect by setting the inertialIntensity property. If you want to make yourself dizzy, try the following and then give the map a give flick!
map = new Microsoft.Maps.Map(
document.getElementById("divMap"),
{
credentials: "ENTER YOUR KEY",
center: new Microsoft.Maps.Location(54, -2),
zoom: 4,
mapTypeId: Microsoft.Maps.MapTypeId.road,
useInertia: true,
inertiaIntensity: 1
}
);
It’s almost impossible to make a side-by-side comparison of any other changes that occur between versions – the source code of the control is obfuscated, causing functions and parameters to be renamed with random letters between versions, so z = new function(cB, a) might be exactly the same as A = new function(h, t), but without comparing line-by-line you can’t be certain.
However, a quick examination of the new library does reveal some other interesting things to note:
- New touch events: “touchstart“, “touchmove“, “touchend“, and “touchcancel“
- New classes: Microsoft.Maps.Streetside and Microsoft.Maps.VenueMaps
Of course, you can’t necessarily infer too much based only on the name of a class in the library but, even if these features aren’t exposed yet, it’s interesting to see what might be coming just round the corner…