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- Microsoft trueSpace7.6 ships. Who should care?July 24 2008
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Animators, artists, graphic designers.
there’s lots of talk today around the release of trueSpace 7.6, especially now that its price has dropped from 700 dollars to zero. Most of the talk is from mapping and GIS focused blogs, which i guess is understandable since it was the mapping division of Microsoft that became the home for Caligari after they were acquired last year. and therefore its also understandable that many of the articles try to compare trueSpace with Google Sketchup. yes, both can export 3D models into virtual worlds (google earth and virtual earth respectively), but that is just the tip of the iceberg. its sorta like trying to compare Visual Studio to UltraEdit; Ultraedit is great for small solo projects but you wouldn’t use it to debug a remote web application.
trueSpace is an integrated application for modeling, animating and rendering with features like inverse kinematics for easy character animation, physics simulation, timeline based storyboarding, and ray traced rendering with motion blur and depth of fiel
- Some Virtual Earth Apps and Links featuring IDV's KML editor in SilverlightJuly 11 2008
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I came across this first app from the earthware blog this week - London Executive Property Bird at first glance is just another Virtual Earth Real Estate app (JaveRea) but it is very well designed and contains some great UX touches like pin clustering. You can read the story of the company behind it in SQM Magazine this month on page 56. yes, its that kind of magazine with pages and all.
With Birds Eye Tourist in hibernation for nearly a year Virtual Globetrotting has been the place to go for online sky spotting. And the gang at VG do an amazing job running that site; its very well organized and has easy to consume feeds for just about everything. and now there's a new kid in town picking up where BET left off with the longer format posts - Meet Virtual Birds Eye. VBE is a little more of a traditional blog featuring tutorials and detailed posts like this one on how to use Mapcruncher and Virtual Earth to view seating a the Indianapolis motor speedway. I hope t
- Measuring distance and area in Live MapsJuly 7 2008
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This post by Greg Sterling this AM is a good reminder to tell you about one of my favorite features on Live Maps – Distance and Area calculations. If you ever wanted to know how far it is between 2 cities or what the area of the surface of a given lake is, Live Maps drawing tools make it really easy.
Even without drawing you can calculate directions to get the approximate drive time and distance between any 2 points by right clicking and choosing ‘Drive From…’ and ‘Drive to…’. Live maps has intercity vector map data for just about everywhere on Earth, including places it doesn’t have detailed city streets for.
- Live Maps updated in ChinaJuly 3 2008
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A big update to http://ditu.live.com/ went out yesterday featuring real time traffic information in Beijing and a free Send to Mobile feature for local search results and transit information. Transit info is now available in 31 cities and many new subway lines have been added for existing areas. Other improvements since V1 include lots more geocoding coverage and refreshed map tiles representing the latest vector street data. click the image below to try it out -
- Ask.com Migrates off of DeCarta. What’s the size of the self-hosted map market?July 2 2008
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This morning’s news [SearchEngineLand | Chris P Blog] that Ask.com’s maps and directions site has migrated from an application built on deCarta’s (formerly Telcontar) mapping platform to Virtual Earth got me wondering about the future of self hosting of mapping infrastructure for high volume sites. The question isn’t if there is a future here at all, there is. In fact the Virtual Earth appliance is offered to our customers with really specialized needs (off the grid or lots of custom pre-rendered data are a couple of good cases) My question is how big this already niche market will become.
If your web based map app calls for supreme control and customization of cartography you historically would build your own cluster around ESRI’s universe of software and get to coding. For small to mid sized apps this was OK assuming you could make the development investment, but it broke down when scaling forced you to build out that cluster. this is where hosted solutions like Virtual Earth come in – you trade off a level of control (you don’t like our highway shields? sorry) for infinite scalability and performance. Both are vi