Google Maps is about 2 years old now, but it still doesn’t seem like old news to me. Google continues to amaze me with the work they are doing with this web application and their free desktop application Google Earth. Yesterday they launched a new feature on Maps called “Street View” which is available on select US cities. Panoramic images (such as Quicktime VR) have been around for a decade. Street View is again proof that old data given a geo-context takes on new meaning. My friend sent me this link to his apartment building in New York.
People around me know that I think AJAX is generally an abomination. With Street View, Google is overlaying Flash on top of AJAX in a way I have never seen before. Astounding!
RUNNINGMAP has added a new feature called a Photographic Point of Interest. Basically this means you can add a photo to a location on the map. I don’t want to host photos so all that runningmap stores is a URL to the location of a photo hosted somewhere else. Users have two choices: paste in a URL or pick one from their Flickr photos.
Y! quietly updated their map tiles last night. If you zoom out in map mode you will see topographic features. Very nice. They also upgraded their geocoder. I am not sure at this time what the new features are but I found that I need to be more precise in the addresses I put in. For example, St. Albert, Alberta does not get me to my city anymore. But, entering “St. Albert, Alberta, Canada” does.
There is a software project underway where I work and I was asked to be the GUI developer. The development team uses Microsoft technologies and they have specified WPF/E as the delivery platform for the client-side application which is web delivered. I have maintained an open mind and recently I spent some time exploring the landscape of this technology. I do not follow Microsoft technologies closely, so email me if I am missing something here.
A couple weeks ago Microsoft announced the offcial name of WPF/E as SilverLight. It is a browser plugin (works on pc and mc) that allows the delivery of rich content in the form of applications and/or video. Sounds like Flash to me. Microsoft is touting it as a superior platform for delivering video. The Flash forums are discussing whether this is a “Flash killer.” It has been difficult wading through all the FUD and hype to get the real goods.
I started my exploration by downloading the trial version of MS Expression Blend, which is advertised as a tool for building rich applications. It is a pretty slick application. I created a new project, placed a list box on the stage and databound it to a rss feed. The List box populated itself at develop-time. Nice. That is where the fun ended for me. I tried to connect it to a REST based webservice but I just could not find out how to add parameters that the webservice needed. I noticed when I created the project that I only had two options for “type of project”: application (.exe) and component. Where is the Silverlight option? Further reading led me download “Expression Blend May Preview Release”; aka “Expression Blend2″; aka “Expression Blend 1.1″. Confusing! So I fired up Blend2 and created a new project and there it was … Silverlight project option. The first thing I noticed when the project opened is that all the components disappeared from the toolbox. No more Combo box, List, buttons or other application control components. I could create boxes, draw lines and add type. I saw some recent tutorial videos on Channel9 that showed how to combine HTML controls with Silverlight content. Huh?
So this is my guess as to what is going on here. Years ago I saw a video showing MS developers using a new tool to develop applications using xaml and Windows Presentation Foundation(WPF). They said WPF (which is .net) was going to be the way Vista was going to render all applications. It was an impressive demo. For reasons I don’t know of, the Vista project was completely reset and instead of a complete rewrite using .Net, MS took Windows XP and started to retool it as the basis for Vista. This means that WPF is not the foundation of Vista. Although WPF applications will still work on .Net enabled Windows systems. Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere is Microsoft’s attempt to re-purpose WPF and it seems that SilverLight is light version of WPF. So really it should be called WPF Lite. And that is why the rich components are not available to SilverLite.
It is clear to me that Adobe is light years ahead of Microsoft in this arena. I really think this technology does not have a chance for so many reasons it’s not worth any more investigation on my behalf. I showed the results of my efforts to the project architect, and he is now considering Flex for the client-side application. Their only concern at this point is the availability of Flex developers should I not be available to continue the project.
UPDATE: There is a good debate about the GUI controls issue here
