When Will You Learn, Bill?
December 3, 2009 • 6:56 pm • POSTED BY Brian TennysonMicrosoft has been getting a C++ recently.
Windows 7 has some okay marketing, the blue screen of death has been updated to black, and they possibly have an answer for Flash (only 6 years late). One of the better things they did recently was to release Bing. Its free, basically has the same results as Google, and the large background image can trick some tech guys into thinking they are using a well designed site.
Then they went and got all Microsoft on us. I read about the release of Bing Maps and decided to see how they were keeping up with Google. I went to the site to give it a try. I got this window:
Don’t make me download software, show me an accessible online version if you want to break some ground…
Well, technically speaking, you can still access the regular version of Bing Maps without installing Silverlight (or at least I can?). The standard version is very similar to Google Maps with the addition of “bird’s eye view” for viewing imagery taken by plane rather than satellites. I think they’ve done a decent job of keeping up with Google on some fronts.
The Silverlight version is specifically “Bing Maps Beta” and the biggest feature in this is the integration of Photosynth (hence the need for Silverlight) and local weather for the area you are zoomed in on. There are also a slew of other “apps” for the maps, including traffic cams and geo-located tweets. Kinda cool, but the UI sucks. It’s impossible to just click and drag the map around freely like you can do in Google Maps (and the regular version of Bing Maps).
Agreed. Bloody silverlight, good grief.