July 26, 2005
Virtual Earth - the pluses and minuses
Wow, there sure were lots of silly articles today about “Microsoft Erases Apple“!
Along the same lines, there really should have been “Microsoft Celebrates the Memory of New York’s Twin Towers“. But that’s life.
It’s unfortunate that these, and some other outdated satellite pictures marred the otherwise nifty launch of the beginnings of a neat product.
My three favorite usability tweaks about Virtual Earth:
1-Being able to use the scroll wheel to zoom in and out! HURRAY!
2-It doesn’t have “Microsoft” stamped all over the map. Sheesh I never realized how much those watermarks bugged me until I saw the pics without watermarking.
3-Inline ambiguous name resolution. Huh? Well, type Alcatraz into the “Where” field, and press return. Inline, it’ll ask you if you want Alcatraz, SF (the prison) or Alctraz, San Juan, Mexico. Neato!
Speaking of Alcatraz, while some of the satellite maps on Virtual Earth aren’t so great - the Alcatraz one is ridiculously great. Any closer and you might as well be there! I hope the other satellite maps eventually reach this depth of detail!
Virtual Earth has some other nifty things that I don’t think people got, which is something that Microsoft could definitely improve upon.
Here’s a nifty one. Let’s say you got out of Penn Station in NY, and on your way to work, you wanted to go to a bank to get some cash so you could get some breakfast and stop by a liquor store (because its one of those days). Well, here, I modelled it.
Check it out, as you move the map around, it continues to refresh and show all the locations of places of that category!
This service is in beta. I can’t wait to see what improvements they coming up soon. For example, I hope they’ll let you see more than 10 results at a time (though I guess that would be kind of cluttery if you searched for “coffee” in Seattle where, by law, they’re required to have 6 on each street).
But guys, if you need help prioritizing, please get a newer satellite map of Long Island so I can show this to my parents! 
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One Comment to “Virtual Earth - the pluses and minuses”
July 26th, 2005 at 6:01 am
You can actually see more than 10 results at a time - click “Tools” then “Options” and then increase the number of results under the “Searching” section.
There are also 2 features I would love to point out, since you haven’t mentioned them:
1. Locate Me - Click this button and Virtual Earth will survey the signal strength of nearby wireless networks (it doesn’t actually connect to any of them) and from that it can calculate your position to a suprisingly high degree of accuracy.
2. 45 degree angle “Eagle Eye” imagery - Before the product launches during the Fall, the VE team plan on adding this. I suggest you take a look at the link below for a preview: http://blogs.msdn.com/cthota/archive/2005/05/23/421114.aspx
Essentially it allows you to view the appearance of the facade of a building instead of just a ‘birds-eye’ view.
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