…starts with a nice morning walk in SF.
Microsoft’s Virtual Earth 3D still is an impressing technology, but Google’s catch up isn’t bad at all too.
Somehow it reminds me of Amazon A9′s ambitious street views, seen a couple of years ago. Unlike Amazon, who only had street views available if I recall correctly, Google can offer this nice feature, which definitely provides very helpful information for travelers finding a particular place in an unknown area, as addition to already existing mapping features. That way they can easily evaluate user acceptance and benefit of the new 3D-like feature and decide later if they’re going to extend it to more cities.
The main advantage over Virtual Earth 3D is probably that Google’s Street View doesn’t ask – assuming an available Flash plugin – for installing any additional program. [via TechCrunch]
Yesterday the Austrian Federal Railways (ÖBB) launched Scotty, a new public transport routing application. It covers Austrian city transport systems, bus lines, inland waterway transport and ferries, European railways and most of swiss bus transport. Until the UEFA EURO 2008 in Austria and Switzerland it’ll include 100% of Swiss and Austrian public transport (Graz and bus lines in Tyrol still need to be added).
The database works pretty impressive: you enter start and end address, Scotty returns the closest public transport stations (including walking distance) and finds the fastest route through all possible public transport systems (including public and private busses, railways, subways, trams, ferries, etc.). I think it’s pretty impressive to combine all that information and data sources from various operators and companies into one single application. That’s probably the most difficult part.
On the output side you get textual information as list where to go and where and when to change the train, bus, etc. Additionally you can open an overview map of your entire route or some detailed maps of station surroundings.
Now here is still some room for improvements on usability and mapping features. In times of AJAX, tiling or vector graphics driven web mapping I would expect a user-friendlier map.
Besides and considering Scotty to support and guide a huge amount of visitors in 2008 some more innovative features would be useful too.
Like reverse geocoding and trigger routing directly in the map for instance: I bet the chance that a visitor can pinpoint his hotel and the places to visit is higher than he is able to spell the german address correctly. Similar to the routing solution on Live Local, which is very well done btw.
Jeff Schiller found out that driving directions are drawn using SVG in Windows Live Local. Interesting and great to see but it leads me to one question: what happened to Microsoft’s VML? Are they dropping (or not any longer forcing) their own technology in favor of an open standard?
Btw, I never had a closer look at Windows Live Local (they should probably flag their product announcements with “works now outside of IE too!”, I’m not even trying to access their services without IE anymore because of too bad experiences in the past) and I must admit that I’m pretty surprised. From a cartographic point of view the maps are looking very nice. In my opinion the map design is much better than in the rest of those search engine mapping services. Aren’t they all using the same or similar sources such as Digital Globe, NAVTEQ, TeleAtlas etc.?
Microsoft offers a lot features within Live Local:
- of course a search for addresses and businesses,
- driving directions,
- it shows you traffic information,
- you can mark places, add them to collections and if you’re a registered MSN user you can save and share them (features known from Platial?),
- and not to forget the famous birds eye view.
Features are good, basically. Too many features are bad. I’m afraid if too many marketing champions get involved in the development of Windows Live Local they will kill the service by a feature overkill. The options I have on the site are already quite versatile. They reach from searching an address, marking and sharing places to visualize traffic information.
I still prefer the “keep it simple” design principle. The worst question a user can ask or think about while accessing your site is: “What can I do here?”. The very basic service or aim of your site must be clear from the beginning. If it’s hidden inside a forest of features then you are having a problem.