Blog List

The HDView team released a gem of a sample app this week from ICE that amongst other things provide a solution for showing 360 degree panoramas. The solution uses three MSI controls to provide a seamless panning experience.

Now what could be a bigger 360 panorama then the Earth itself?

There’s less than a week till our 2nd Girl Geek Dinner Brisbane and this month we’re fortunate to have Susannah Raub speaking at our dinner. Google have been kind enough to send her up to Brisbane and has offered to put $20/head towards the dinner.

Susannah Raub joined Google in September 2004 as a software engineer in Mountain View, California.  She worked on many features of Google Desktop until February 2006 when she moved to New York and joined the Google Maps - Search

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So you’re interested in Silverlight and Virtual Earth, you’ve downloaded the DeepEarth code but are now completely lost? Well check out two 20min videos to walk you through the code and get you started. Part1 and Part2.

The videos essentially walk you through the solutions, pointing out what each of the projects does, the structure and how to get the right project running.

The Virtual Earth JavaScript control is not small weighing in at 217KB when compressed in Version 6.2. When you require the rich experience of Virtual Earth this size is not an issue, the control is aimed at broadband users and within a few moments of interacting with the map you can easy exceed this with the rich imagery being loaded on demand. But what if your web page only needs to show the Virtual Earth map when a user asks for it or you just want your page to load super fast? You need to load Virtual Earth on demand.

See an example here: http://www.soulsolutions.com.au/examples/VE62/loadondemand.htm (view source for full code)

The Virtual Earth JavaScript control has supported tile overlays for some time. A tile layer is set of 256px square images matching the Mercator projection of Virtual Earth. Tile layers are usually layered on top of Virtual Earth, the control supports transparency and an opacity of the entire layer. With the latest release of Version 6.2 of the control you can now disable the base tile layers allowing for greater performance when your tiles are all you need. Lets look at what is required to load OpenStreetMap tiles into Virtual Earth.

We use Admin Centre for a few sites, one of the main ones is Geek Girl Blogs. I’ve done up an article to show the different membership and branding options it provides here.

VEWS was just released and after a few attempts myself to get it working I thought I would share a short video on the sign up process and adding the references to Visual Studio 2008.

Video after the break:

On the 22nd August John and I participated in Technology Take You Anywhere 2008, an event to help encourage school girls into Technology careers.  We were placed in the Multimedia space up against the dance mats, game bikes etc. We devised a bit of a game where we’d show the girls an image of a famous landmark and they had to find it using Virtual Earth, an XBox controller and help from their school mates.

Today we have so many choices for how we are going to share photos on the web, not only a variety of web sites but also many different display technologies. I took the opportunity to try a few of the new Microsoft products out: DeepZoom using Silverlight2, Photosynth, HDView and of course Windows Live Photo Gallery to stitch a panorama. Finally I’ve added a little YouTube video of the event itself.

28th of August we had our first Brisbane Girl Geek Dinner. We had some great feedback and will start planning the next event very soon so watch this space.