Earthware Blog

I found this Google Earth Network Link today on the Google Earth Forums:

Map Comparision Network Link

It allows you to navigate to a position in Google Earth and when you stop moving, creates a pushpin which has direct links to the same co-ordinates in Google Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth and Yahoo maps.

I found it a very quick way to compare aerial map data, especially to see the date differences between the data for each provider. For example look at the business park below, there are obviously a good few months difference in date between the providers as half that buildings are missing on some.

 

 

 

Microsoft Virtual Earth

 

Google Maps

As you can see the Google Maps / Earth data is much more up to date, now if only they would get full UK coverage!

As a taster for the demos we are working on here at Earthware.co.uk I thought I’d give you a sneak preview of one we have just finished.

This network link lists all the UK cinemas and their show times in Google Earth and is updated daily.

UK Cinema Show Times

The idea of this demo shows clients how existing data can be powerfully used in Google Earth and other mapping technologies to give users a much richer experience. It is also a demo that shows how ad based affiliate revenue can be integrated into maps.

If you have any comments or questions please feel free to add them to the comments for this blog entry.

I was having a bad monday until this cheered me up, it just shows how important accurate mapping is to ANY business.

[googlevideo]-7472534472179011429[/googlevideo]

UPDATE: You can now purchase birdseye imagery directly from us at Earthware, to find our more see our birds eye and aerial imagery page. 

Having recently played around with Microsoft Virtual Earth I’ve been amazed by the ‘Birds Eye Views’ some of which are now available for UK cities including St. Albans, Bristol, Brighton, Cambridge, Swindon and a few others. You can see them all by looking at this collection:

UK Birds Eye Views

There is also full UK coverage of reasonable detailed aerial maps, much better than Google Maps current UK coverage. For UK businesses looking for mapping solutions this is brilliant news and we are working with a few companies on projects using this now. Here is a great sample of the ‘Birds Eye View’:

The only downside is the commercial licensing Currently it’s still a bit vague but here is what the virtual earth site says:

Transaction Limitations. Microsoft reserves the right, from time to time, in its sole discretion, to impose a limit on the number of Transactions (as that term is defined below) that You may request from the API or to otherwise limit or suspend Your access to the API or the Service. Without limiting the foregoing, You may not request more than Five Thousand (5,000) Transactions from the API in a twenty four hour period. A “Transaction” means using any of the following Service functionalities (and subsets thereof), or any successor thereof or addition thereto, all as described in the Service software development kit located at http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=4932476 (“SDK”) including: i) Find Methods (Find, FindResult, FindResults,; ii) Route Methods: (Route,RouteItinerary, and RouteSegment); and, iv) rendering eight (8) map or photographic imagery tiles (256 x 256 pixels per tile).

So you can use it on a public facing, low traffic site up to 5,000 “transactions” per day, otherwise you need a MapPoint account (large price with high entry transaction volumes). Currently however there is no way to add your MapPoint key to the current maps API, so its all a bit premature.

If you want to have a go at coding your own maps I suggest you take a look at the SDK here.

Those of you who have downloaded and tried Googles latest beta release of Google Earth will notice it’s had a large redesign of its look and feel.

Today I found a very helpful resource that details the new user interface so I thought I’d share it here (click below to see the full image)

Had some bits I hadn’t noticed too.

Over the last few weeks we have been busy finishing of various demos including our upcomming uk cinemas demo. During development we’ve come across a few ‘issues’ with writing KML an KMZ files to the users browser from an .aspx page using the “Content-Disposition” HTTP Header that I thought it would be helpful to share with other .Net Google Earth developers who may come acrross the same problems.

ALL the problems are due to Internet explorer! Firefox works perfectly all the time It seems I suffers from a number of problems, our specific ones being:

1. IE often has problems honouring AddHeader(“Content-Disposition”,”attachment; filename=myfile.kmz”) and instead prompts the user to open a file called the same as the .aspx page they are on.
2. IE also has problems actually downloading the file once you have the filename comming up ok, complaining about not being able to contact the internet site. Bizarely the page works fine it you follow a link to it from another page, but not if your enter the url directly into the address bar?

Both solutions in the end were simple, but not obvious

1. If, just like us, you have IIS setup to compress all .aspx files (Gzip compression) then each .aspx request has a header “Content-Encoding: gzip” that IIS adds for you. Unfortunatly IE then ignores your “Content-Disposition” header, so to fix it add Response.AppendHeader(“Content-Encoding”, “none;”) and then it works!
2. This one is even simplier, but we have not idea why this works. Just add Response.ClearHeaders() and the file will work properly from a direct url

So other than now having a bigger hate for IE, its all working. We hope to have some of the first demos live soon.