Bing beta brings bling to maps

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 03 December 2009 06:13

Your IT - Home IT

Elsewhere, Bird's Eye combines satellite and aerial photos to generate the scenery.

The Bing Maps beta also provides an applications gallery. Adding Bing Maps (or Google Maps) content to a web application is nothing new, but this is the reverse: it adds Bing and third-party map-related applications to Bing Maps.

One example is virtualglobetrotting.com's Roadside sculptures shows - you guessed it - roadside sculptures that are in the area being viewed. So if you're looking at the Melbourne area, Roadside sculptures identifies Gateway to Melbourne (the 'cheese stick' sculpture over the freeway from the airport), and Vault (better known as the Yellow Peril).

Bing Maps' new navigation controls seem well thought out, making it easy to switch between views and zoom in or out. And if you're used to Google Maps Street View orange man, Bing's blue man works in much the same way for Streetside.

You may be able to find the Bing Maps beta here but if you get redirected to a local version, go to the Bing home page, click "Go to Bing in the United States", "Maps", and finally the link to the beta.

The Silverlight plug-in is required to use the Bing Maps beta.

The normal AJAX version of Bing Maps was updated last month.