Earthware Blog

Within hours of Google launching Google Street View imagery covering 99% of UK roads, Earthware has released their first implementation of the new imagery in commercial property portal NovaLoca.com.

The Google Street View imagery in NovaLoca.com allows users to view commercial property in the major UK cities and in smaller towns and villages right across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The user now gets an even better impression of what a property being advertised on the site is like, without having to visit it in person, making finding commercial property easier than it has ever been before.

Earthware and NovaLoca have been working together for a long time to keep NovaLoca’s property mapping well ahead of the competition. In October 2008 we implemented the very first UK street side imagery in NovaLoca’s maps for commercial property in London before Google released any of their Street View imagery in the UK. This latest addition means that Street View imagery is now a standard function of the property maps where ever you are looking for commercial property in the UK. Yet again, this means NovaLoca have beaten all their competitors by becoming the first UK commercial property website to be using this technology.

If you want to know how you can use online mapping and Google Street View in your website please contact Earthware on 0845 642 9880.

Google Maps have today launched Google StreetView imagery for the entire UK and we mean the entire UK!  Nearly a quarter of a million roads across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are now available to ‘walk’ down from your computer screen. The 360 degree pictures mean you can have a good look around as you travel down the street, and you can deep zoom into the images to see the detail (although faces and registration plates are blurred out in accordance to the privacy protection rules).

But Google have been even busier than that: they have also released Google Street View imagery covering the majority of France, Italy and Spain too.

Although Google Street View has been available in 25 major cities in the UK since March 2009, to now have Street View right across the UK is a phenomenal achievement from the Google Maps team and will be changing the way people use online maps to display geographical information in interactive maps. The StreetView maps can be embedded into any website to help businesses display their location and any geographical information on a map, immediately we see major benefits from property mapping and travel mapping.

For anyone that’s interested you can now see where all the Earthware fun happens:

View Larger Map

If you are interested in how you can use Google Maps and Google Street View to display your information then contact Earthware on 0845 642 9880.

Earthware is an entrepreneurial company specialising in developing online mapping solutions and websites using the latest technologies. Silverlight is proving to be the future direction of our company which is why we are looking for a developer with experience in this technology but with a hunger to learn more both here and in other technologies and to apply this throughout the planning, designing and development process. Other required skills include strong full life cycle Asp.net, C# and WCF, whilst experience with Ajax frameworks, XSLT / XML and unit testing is desirable.

If you fit this description and are interested in applying for the position please email your CV explaining how you meet our requirements and giving example projects/URLs to recruitment@earthware.co.uk.

All applicants must be eligible to work in the UK. No contact from agencies please.

At the inaugural Bing Maps User group in the UK, Jim Lynn from the BBC was invited to present on a project that he led at the BBC to explore how Bing Maps Silverlight can be used.  I am not a techie but found this a fascinating exploration into how Silverlight is transforming the online mapping experience.  As a synopsis, Jim spent nearly twelve months on different aspects of this project.  First, he created and loaded Ordnance Survey map tiles into Bing Maps Silverlight to enable deep zoom Ordnance Survey mapping. He then explored how you can integrate geographical based data and information into the maps using examples such as David Dimbleby’s “How We Built Britain” showing the video playing as the marker moves along a path on the map as the video shows him driving down a road.

Jim also separated the Ordnance Survey names layer from the map layer to enable the map to be rotated whilst the names remain horizontal on the page (no mean feat) and embedded deep zoom photographs at their correct geographical locations which cluster to avoid overlapping as you change zoom levels. These embedded photographs can also be ‘flipped over’ to reveal information about the place on the back. He also showed (for a small part of Britain) how the BBC archive can be displayed on a Bing Map.

If you want to talk about how your data/information/business can be brought to life using Bing Maps Silverlight, please contact Earthware for a chat.

We often get asked by our clients, and prospective clients, what areas of the UK are covered by Bird’s Eye imagery. Whilst we have a long list of place names this isn’t always helpful as what you really want is to see is the UK Bird’s Eye coverage plotted on a map.

Well we found one the other day that Microsoft have done and here it is (areas shaded yellow have Bird’s Eye):

The two other questions that we often get asked are “Will our area have Bird’s Eye View imagery soon?” or “Will new imagery be released in our area?”. As the imagery is provided by BLOM pictometry (I was lucky enough to have a tour of the hanger and see the planes and the cameras they use – very cool!) and where and when routes are flown depends on a number of often uncontrollable factors, I am not even sure that Microsoft know the answer to this. However, if you want to keep up to date then please see the monthly releases in the Bing Maps World Tour, a bespoke mapping solution which Earthware created for Microsoft, which clearly displays the details of all Microsoft’s monthly imagery releases (aerial imagery and Birds Eye views).

Earthware are delighted to have been invited by Gary McCausland (from BBC1’s “Axe the Agent” to do the web design, web development, interactive mapping and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) for his new venture Rovster.

Rovster allows a property owner who wants to “sell my house privately” to sign up and advertise online with a free property listing.  Whether you have flats to rent, property to rent or you want to buy a property in … or sell my house in …. then Rovster is seeking to debunk the property market.

We are delighted that not only did Gary decide to integrate Earthware interactive property mapping but also to use our sister, The Technology Studio to do the web design and development.

We wish Gary every success with Rovster!

The Earthware team

post updated please click here

Google have now release streetview for 23 cities in the UK,  only five months after we first included Seety’s excellent London street views in our EarthwareProperty product

The cities current covered are:

London Bristol Norwich Liverpool Southampton Birmingham Oxford Derby Nottingham Cambridge Manchester Sheffield Scunthorpe

York Leeds Bradford Coventry  Newcastle Cardiff Swansea Belfast Glasgow Edinburgh Dundee Aberdeen

This is a great achievement from Google and it will be interesting to see what UK companies start to do with this new imagery. It looks like Google have spent a lot of time sorting out the privacy images by blurring faces and registration plates etc. Here at Earthware we are waiting on Google to announce some way of adding information on top of street view images.

Its been rumoured for a few days but now its official the new version of the Virtual Earth ajax web control has been released. Considering this is just a minor release it  has a lot of features packed into it:

1. Localised map tiles for German, French, Italian and Spanish

   

2. Built in client side pushpin clustering
3. Landmark based routing, currently supported in the USA for fast food restaurants and petrol stations
4. Massive improvements in European and Worldwide addresses parsing specifically improved for UK, France, Italy and Spain
5. Static maps for mobile (see more below)
6. Ability to disable the default virtual earth tiles, when adding custom tile layer (no word on how to license this scenario though)

There is now also a set of Virtual Earth web services (seperate from the mappoint web services):

1. Imagery meta data webservice - gives date range of imagery and provider details (only for ortho imagery)
2. Geocoding web service - using the virtual earth geocoder, not the mpws one and with the improvements as mentioned above
3. Reverse geocoding worldwide - available wherever routing is available
4. Search and routing - web service methods to match the ajax controls existing methods
5. Image tiles and static maps - you can now request tiles via the web service rather than directly to use in your own custom map controls and also for mobile devices

There have even been some updates to the 3D control and content:

1. Realtime weather and clouds, the clouds look great as you fly through them

   

2. Improved installed for the 3d plugin
3. More options available to user including disabling weather (when its raining and you are showing the client there lovely new beach resort )
4. Improved texture quality on 3d buildings
5. Improved ’street level’ textures on buildings - this is Microsofts answer to Google Streetview where they have textured the lower parts of buildings with imagery taken at street level
6. Import of models from your own hosting (no need to upload to live.com) in the lightwave obj format
7. New version of 3dvia shape

Getting Stuck In

To get started with version 6.2 first try the interactive sdk then read through the reference sdk including the whats new section.

Summary

There seem to have been a bit of a delay getting this release live as it was due to be released on the 22nd but it goes to show how big a release it is. So as you can see the Virtual Earth dev team have been really busy. Its brilliant to see how many features requested by the developer community have been released. To be honest when I was asked what new features we wanted to see in the future there weren’t many I could think of any more, it just goes to show how mature a product the ajax control is becoming. Now access to the tiles have been officially supported it will be interesting to see what commercial uses people find for this and the mobile maps.

It’s also great to see the hard work of the MultiMap team making it into the Virtual Earth control as they contributed to the pushpin clustering and the massive improvements in worldwide geocoding and address parsing.

Here at Earthware we have been using Shape for a while now in our interactive mapping and V-scapes products but we have yet to see any updates in the software until now. There have been several new features and a new tool added to shape of which I  will give brief overview of below

Texturing was one area that I felt needed improvement in the original version and I had the opportunity to voice my concerns to the team at 3Dvia when I was collaborating with them on the Virtual Earth Eos Generali project.

The principal improvement that has been added is a non uniform scale tool similar in function to the toolset in Google Sketchup. The texture manipulation tool now allows the user to stretch a texture vertically and horizontally in addition to original uniform scale There is also a new tool for texture manipulation which brings up 4 pins positioned on the texture and a central button which has the unique function of filling your polygon with what is contained within the 4 surrounding pins. The process is demonstrated in the images below.

 

The pins can also be moved manually in an advanced mode that will allow the texture to be stretched in a non uniform manner. It works in a similar way to the push pins in Google Sketchup but is set up in a different way and personally I find it much easier to use and understand.

Manipulate has also changed slightly. Previously it produced a set of slightly confusing directional indicators when the user clicked on the element that was to be moved. Now you receive a helpful marker to shows where you have selected which has a number of arrows attached to it clearly indicating the directions or movement available.

 

With the existing simple but strong tool set I think that these additions further strengthen the unique offering from 3Dvia.

If you have read the previous post you will also be aware of the 3D cities that Microsoft is pioneering in Virtual Earth. They look really good and also allow for embedding of new models within the existing cities. Once they are uploaded it also provides for manipulation, allowing you to ensure it is exactly where you want it :@)