New Version of Virtual Earth
Last week Microsoft released a new version of Virtual Earth (v6.1).
It’s great to see some of the following features:
- Bird’s Eye Hybrid View: It’s easy to get disoriented in Bird’s Eye. Seeing the street names will really help.
- Walking directions and traffic-based routing: Walking directions will be good for urbanites who want to measure the distance from a listing to work and traffic will be good fro suburbanites.
- Improved Safari Support: While introduced in v6.0 sounds like they fixed some bugs. Since re-enabling Safari support for our map our Safari traffic has almost doubled.
- Improved Printing Support: Lots of folks print out our maps and details pages when touring homes and we definitely have some bugs. Hopefully when we switch over to v6.1 we can kill those bugs.
I am less excited about their focus on improving 3D tours. I’d much rather see the team focus on adding street level imagery (more than later though). We’d also like to see a mobile version of the SDK and we are always looking for performance improvements (though it sounds like they improved the performance of panning.)
So when are going to move to VE 6.1? I’d expect us to switch in about a month and half. We do have a release going out sooner but to feel comfortable with a new version of VE we like to do a test pass with it on all our supported browsers and we already did the test pass for this earlier release.