Archive for October 2006
What’s the difference between Virtual Earth and MapPoint Web Service?
From http://www.microsoft.com/virtualearth/faq.mspx:
Q. What happened to the MapPoint Web Service? What is the difference between the Virtual Earth platform and MapPoint Web Service?
A. The Virtual Earth platform encompasses the next evolution of the MapPoint Web Service offering with innovative new capabilities. The Virtual Earth platform is not only a new brand name; it represents a richer, more powerful offering from Microsoft to companies of all industries. Developers have the flexibility of tapping into one of the two Virtual Earth application programming interfaces (API): MapPoint Web Service API using SOAP XML to communicate with customer applications and Virtual Earth Map Control that lets users make request via JavaScript to an AJAX map object.
Here are some quick comparisons:
|
|
Virtual Earth |
MapPoint Web Service |
|
Map Styles |
Road, Aerial, Birds eye |
Over 30 different styles (optimised schemes for night viewing, etc) however no aerial imagery |
|
Integration style |
JS control (best for embedding in web pages) |
SOAP web service (usable anywhere) |
|
Interface style |
Drag and drop positioning, scroll wheel support, interactive pushpins, AJAX based. |
Roll your own (it returns an image and you have to work out what to do with it). |
|
Pushpin support |
You create them all yourself on the fly using API calls – any clustering / filtering optimizations have to be done manually. |
Can upload pushpin sets to their databases and they will handle plotting / clustering and filtering. |
|
Routes |
Specify a start point and an end point and they’ll give you a route in text. End of story. |
Specify the waypoints, preferred road styles (back roads, highways, toll roads, non-toll roads) and it will return a machine readable result set. |
|
Cost |
Free (commercial use has some minor restrictions) |
Per transaction |
|
SDK documentation and support |
Basic MSDN docs, active community (www.viavirtualearth.com) |
Plenty of MSDN docs and articles, including VS.NET integrated help and plenty of websites (www.mp2kmag.com) |
Scrybe
I just had this link IMed to me by Tim Kremer. It will be interesting to see a release and start culling the hype from the features, but their short intro video so far is pretty amazing:
Based on the video, I’d put my money on it being an AJAX based solution using Flash for client side storage (most likely a proprietary version of something like AMASS).
Am I Hot or Not?
Not me – my VS.NET IDE color scheme!
Let me (and the world) know what you think over at Is your IDE hot or not?:
Custom VS.NET2005 color schemes – they’re all the rage
It seems like everyone’s doing it, so I thought I’d spend some time focussing on getting my own VS.NET color scheme polished off.
While developing the scheme I’ve focused on a number of concepts that I believe in (whether they are right or wrong – I believe in them):
- Reading light text on a dark background is much easier than doing it the other way around. Don’t believe me? Take a photo of the text written on the base of a light globe while it’s turned on, then try and read the text – it’s almost impossible. Now, invert the colors and try again – easy!
- High contrast makes reading harder too – pure white on pure black will strain your eyes a lot faster than an off white on a dark grey background. Most people can’t even tell that the background color in the screenshot below is a dark brown rather than a pure black – but it is, and it makes a difference.
If you want to give it a whirl, download the Consolas font then download the .vssettings file. Keep in mind that this is only a v1 – the C# looks awesome, but I’ve yet to format the XML and HTML. Of course, I haven’t even tested VB.NET as I don’t even have it installed! I’ll post a v2 with colors for everything as soon as I get sick of looking at ugly XML/HTML.
So, without further ado, here’s what I’ve come up with so far:
The psychology behind your "Send/Receive" button addiction
Ever wondered why it feels so satisfying to keep clicking the Send/Receive button in Outlook, even if you just clicked it, or if you know you don’t have an internet connection?
This excellent blog post explains the psychology behind all this:
http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2006/09/why_email_is_addicti.html
(via http://blog.clearcontext.com/2006/09/pavlovs_email.html)
