Greg Schechter's Blog

Introducing the new Bing Maps beta

Well, I’ve been off the air for quite some time, and now have the opportunity to pop up and talk about what I’ve been working on lately.  I made the switch from focusing on building platforms like Silverlight, WPF and the Desktop Window Manager to building an app built on such platforms – namely the Bing Maps site.  It’s great way to be able to see what you’ve been working on from a different perspective, and exercise a different set of muscles.

Last week was an exciting one: we launched the beta of the new Bing Maps site, the first to use Silverlight.  We don’t use Silverlight just for the sake of using it, but because it enables fantastic user-experiences and superior performance and fluidity.  Chris Pendleton’s blog entry give a lot more detail on what we’ve released.  Rather than repeating it here, I recommend just giving his entry a read.  Meanwhile, I will provide some links to some cool examples here – check ‘em out:

• Bird’s Eye view in Manhattan looking over Central Park West
• Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood highlighting establishments via “What’s nearby”
• A Photosynth, displayed in Bing Maps, of a famous sculpture of socialist workers in Tiananmen Square that I took back in May
• Today’s Front Pages – from around the world
• Current Tweets from downtown Chicago
• Locally relevant blogging content from San Francisco

We’ve learned a lot in building the site, and we have lots of surprises and improvements up our sleeves for upcoming releases, functionality, and perf improvements.  So stay tuned, and enjoy using Bing Maps!