Tad's IT Blog
Posts tagged microsoft
Bing Maps: Suppressing the Bird’s Eye Popup
Sep 28th
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.
Bing Search Getting Faster on Blogs
Jul 21st
Microsoft’s newly-branded Bing search seems to be getting faster at indexing & displaying relevant blog content.
Just a month ago, shortly after the Bing launch, I was doing some tests on how fast Bing was indexing content as compared to Yahoo and Google – especially with respect to blogs.
I put up a number of blog posts on Bing Maps and KML, and then 1-2 days later, began searching around on Google and Bing for more info on Bing Maps KML implementation. Within about an hour, Google had already indexed my KML blog posts, and had them available in the results, integrated in to the normal SERPs. Bing, however, had none of my blog posts indexed, and after a week still had none of my posts indexed. Now, these were posts I also went and threw links to on forums and all over the web, as I was trying to get a specific question answered – so both Google and Bing had spiders all over my site basically hourly. However, 2 weeks later, I was searching for more info on Bing Maps and KML, and in Google I almost couldn’t get anything but my blog posts – whereas Bing still was not indexing it. They’re showing now.
Well, now the situation appears to have changed. I made a post on one of my other blogs about a new Dianetics DVD that came out. I haven’t really linked this one from anywhere, so I thought it’d be interesting to see how they were showing up.
Oddly enough, in both Bing and Google, my posts are showing up on the first page of results when searching for “new dianetics dvd”. Bing was indexing & showing blog post results after only about 10 hours of having been posted.
In any case, I thought it an interesting observation – and one that’s probably going to get me to use Bing more – as when trying to solve programming problems, the answers are commonly on forums and blogs, something that was getting a poor hit rate on Bing but showing relevant results in Google.
KML on Bing Maps: Beyond the 200-item Limit
Jul 6th
In importing KML into a Bing Maps (nee MS Virtual Earth) map, you will run into a limit of how many items or shapes it will allow you to render.
The reason for this is performance, as it’s generally understood that one will start getting degraded performance as you go up over 200 shapes being put on the map at any one time. Well, I did indeed experience such in IE8, but not in Safari, Chrome or Firefox – so, many of us may want/need to put more than their default 200 shapes on the screen.
To do this, you use the MaxImportedShapes property of the VEShapeSourceSpecification class (defined here), done something like this:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=6"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var map = null;function EventMapLoad() {
var shapeLayer = new VEShapeLayer();
// var shapeLimit = new VEShapeSourceSpecification.MaxImportedShapes = 500;
var shapeSpec = new VEShapeSourceSpecification(VEDataType.ImportXML, http://myhost.com/myKmlFile.kml, shapeLayer);
shapeSpec.MaxImportedShapes = 500;
map.ImportShapeLayerData(shapeSpec);
}function CreateMap() {
map = new VEMap(‘myMap’);
map.onLoadMap = EventMapLoad;
map.LoadMap(null, 3, VEMapStyle.Hybrid);
}
</script>
This will set the maximum number of shapes to 500. I haven’t tested with much more than that, so performance will almost certainly be intolerable if you kick that up to 1000 shapes plus.
Displaying a KML Feed on Bing Maps
Jun 24th
Okay – while not exactly where I wanted to be, I now see that I’m able to easily display a KML feed in Bing Maps (the artist formerly known as Microsoft Virtual Earth) by appending a “mapurl” parameter to maps.bing.com, and then feed it in the URL to your KML file. Like
For example, if you click through on the link above, you’ll see the KML file that I generated from my Flickr cross-country set, then superimposed on Bing Maps, with a nicely-formatted sidebar containing all of the other various metadata stored in the KML file.
I’ve still not been able to get their other sample to work, probably due to some sort of mime-type issue, but the above is a pretty nice feature.
Recent Comments