Home > SSW Standards > Better Software Suggestions > SSW Microsoft Virtual Earth Suggestions
Strategic Suggestions
-
Make contact information for Microsoft personal available
for:
- Business Development - people who can help win large proposals
- Technical
Team - with separate people for each aspect of virtual earth
- Eg. Projection specialist
- Map data specialist
- Integration with other platform specialists
- Licensing Team
-
Microsoft Supporting the application
- The Virtual Earth team should clearly identify what functionality is fully supported
by Microsoft. ( I like the Microsoft Ajax team approach to this ).
- Partners & Clients have a duty of care to know what functionality is supported.
- Support for previous versions
- New URL for every major and minor version.
- how long will each be supported?
- Proper Testing - Everyone's v3 website crashed when v4 of VE was released.
-
Monetisation Strategy - this was a good suggestion from
Dr. Neil
- Microsoft should make an advertising monetisation system, with a revenue-share model
with developers/publishers. This will encourage more entry-level implementations,
which can then drive the community and lead to larger VE sales.
-
Clear Published Pricing/Licensing System
- Microsoft should look to Amazon's web services, which are leading the field in this
area.
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Clear Roadmap on features going forward
- The situation where Microsoft kept the v4 feature set secret, is pretty immature.
Businesses need a clear roadmap of future Virtual Earth features, so they can make
informed decisions on adopting the technology, and planning for future releases.
-
Public Site pushing the technology to business customers
- Suggested solutions/Case studies for different verticals
- Partner directory
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Virtual Earth Developer Certifications
- 40% programming with VE technology
- 40% Application Architecture & Best Practices
- 20% Mapping/GIS concepts (
although Dr. Neil believes this knowledge will become commodity as improved mapping
functionality is integrated into the platform)
-
Improving the entire Microsoft Platform for GIS support
- by adding spatial extensions to Microsft SQL Server to support the handling of spatial
data and complex queries.
Technical Suggestions
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Data & Utilities Suggestions
- There should be public methods for geocoding and reverse-geocoding. The geocoding
should be of high quality. even if we have to pay for it.
- The Find Location/
Find address method should have a callback, so we know when the location has been
found.
- The Find Location method tends to have problems with area codes. Sometimes
it works, and sometimes it doesn't.
- Error information should optionally catchable
in a callback, rather than being displayed automatically on screen.
- There should
be more data available for Points of Interest, with the ability load & switch on
and off layers with the appropriate data
- Eg. Cinemas, Utilities, Landmarks, Railways [Michael Kring]
- There should be optional dynamically downloadable javascript libraries for calculations
such as:
- Conversion between different coordinate systems (eg. Mercator to/from Long/Lat)
-
Distance between points
- Distance to nearest features
- Eg distance to nearest road, nearest junction
-
Map Manipulation Suggestions
- Resizing of the map needs to work correctly in all browsers. At 100%, the scalebar
often does not show. Working examples should be made for maps scaled to 100% of
the page that work in all browsers.
- There should be documentation on how to
add extra zoom level information - eg. To allow the user to zoom in and see floor
plans of a house Ability to record user actions into the browser history.
- Dynamic
loading of map components as needed to cut down the size of the footprint.
- Java script size impact
- DOM footprint (eg. For dashboards)
- There
could be a variety of different map dashboards and map rendering styles that are
selected & downloaded on demand
- There should be multiple rendering styles.. eg. Without roads, without railways...
-
Suggestions for General Usability Improvements
- The cursors need to be improved. Eg. When you click the map, and drag the map
there should be appropriate cursors, rather than the current hand.
- 90% of
non-technical users find the default dashboard too hard to use and understand. There
should be a clear labelling of the zoom control. The slider should also be improved
(look at Microsoft Ajax examples)
-
Suggestions for Improved Map Points
- Z-index of map points
- There needs to be a way of specifying the z-index ordering of points
- There
should also be a bring to front, send to back methods
- The map should correctly support transparent png images for both overlays and pins.
(in all browsers)
- There should be a method to change the icon of a pin (rather
than requiring us to delete and add the pin)
-
Suggestions for Improved Layer Support
- Layers should have improved methods to control the z-index of the layers
-
Layers should have improved transparency support
- There should be ways to add
animated imagery to layers. Eg. Adding animated isobars for a weathermap
- We
should be able to add individual markers to layers, rather than just using Live
Collections and GeoRSS feeds
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Suggestions for Improved Marker Popups
- There should be public methods for showing and hiding the ero popup for a particular
marker (using pinID)
- Currently asynchronously loading data to place in a popup
requires a hack. Please make a public interface for this
- There should be support
for opening multiple ero popups at the same time if desired. (and support for deleting
them again)
- Options to display the popup as a new copy, or using the existing
popup
- Methods for deleting ero popups (probably based on pinID)
-
Map Cruncher Suggestions
Acknowledgements
Tim Kremer