Bing Maps: Suppressing the Bird’s Eye Popup
When I was working on my last Bing Maps project for Webworld Technologies, my Microsoft rep told me, “…and as soon as you’re ready, let me know and I’ll give you a hack to disable that f’n birds-eye popup”. I didn’t know that was the official inside term for it, but like so many internal naming conventions that stick with you, I felt it was appropriately named. I think the Bing bird’s eye view is a fantastic way to visualize maps too, but the little “VIEW THIS IN THE COOL BIRDS EYE VIEW” popup that comes up every time you refresh the map is a bit far into the “annoying UI element” department.
To disable it, just do the following: right after invoke your map.LoadMap, hide the popup element as follows:
map.LoadMap(new VELatLong(38.865326, -77.074930), 12 ,’h’ ,false);
// Suppress popup saying Bird’s Eye available
document.getElementById("MSVE_obliqueNotification").style.visibility = "hidden";
That will get rid of that popup any time the map loads.
Years ago, I heard that the people who designed the Quicken financial package included a feedback tool so that you could say ‘hey, you know what? It should do this. And it should stop doing that.’ They listened, and they took the suggestions (well, the ones that they thought were good, anyway.
Wouldn’t it be nice if M’Soft did that?
Very agreed. At the very least, I'm a big fan of, in UI design, if you have anything at all that pops up (even if temporarily) it should have a close button. Close button presses can then be tracked, and the UI designers can then tell if people are always closing the annoying little thing.
That's the wonderful thing about web UI design, is that unlike a product like Quicken, you can then track everyone's every movement through the app.