Sleepiness in Seattle

This is an important step of Microsoft’s Virtual Earth improving its branding awareness and could also potentially lead to more value added features to live local search. Virtual Earth comes later than MapQuest, Yahoo maps, and Google Maps, but it does has some nice features like 3-D view, 3-D building model, birds eye view, and my favorite feature Scratch Pad where you can store your favorite locations of restaurants, stores, and so on under different categories. This way you don’t have to type in addresses you may check on the map from time to time and you can also conveniently share interesting locations with your friends through email or blog posts. It also showes real time traffic data and road incidents, which could be viewed on your cell phone or GPS to optimize your driving. The push pin is a cute tool too to enable you to mark any location where there is no valid address. There are lots of aspects that Virtual Earth maps needs to improve too though. For example, once I check the driving direction. The route Virtual Earth gave me looks optimal and shorter than the the one I got from Google maps, however in reality the shorter route is mostly through very narrow streets with lots of stop signs. Obviously, the "convenience" of the the streets that are picked for the routing is not weighted enough in Virtual Earth. By the way, if you are interested you can try out the Virtual Earth plugin for MovableType. It’s fun to play with the 3D map on your blog.

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Zimbra Goes Offline With Zimbra Desktop

The history is once again recurring. Off-line application, then online application, and then "off-line application" again. But rather than circling, this is an evolution in a rising spiral style. When Google online web applications take on Microsoft Office and there is heated discussion about their comparison, this third approach is emerging. Although Google enjoys the buzz of its branding and pricing, web apps still has many limitations like rich UI, performance, security, difficult admin maintenance due to frequent incremental software change, and so on. Off-line ajax solution answered some very important challenges of web apps. For example, the not yet pervasive and stable Internet connection, page latency, and UI responsiveness. This helps narrowing the gap between the web apps and traditional desktop apps.

From server client model’s point of view. The same recurring phenomenon is going on. Single machines, main frame, distributed systems, peer to peer systems, web applications running on central servers, and now off-line web applications. The big difference is the placement of software components and the global computing environments and infrastructure – majorly Internet.

From hierarchical architecture’s point of view, the off-line web application is a more sophisticated caching model which involves not only static data like web pages and cookies but also software components and application states that run independently on the client machine without any help from the mother ship – servers. This has a load of benefits. For example, performance will improve a lot. "Off-line" is not only used when the network connection is off. Software components and state is cached locally and reduced a large portion of the server-client interaction round trips, especially those bulky post backs. Users data are better maintained locally and is immune to page load failure due to temporary connection problems.

Off-line mode is a significant innovation, but most of the rest of the system is more or less copy from Microsoft Office and/or Google Apps. But it’s always like that, new startups who come up with a product, 10% of which are new ideas, are regarded innovative, but the big guys who come up with a similar product are still regarded as copy cats The expectations for them are quite different. The world is flattening and so does the computer software industry. These emerging new products are pushing the software moving forward faster.

There are some great map plug-ins from Nick Punter and Stefan Dembowski.  I implemented this new one based on Virtual Earth.  Some new features in this plug-in are:

• 3-D maps and buildings enable you to hover above the city like driving a helicopter (http://imagine-windowslive.com/minisites/livemaps/default.aspx).
• Bird’s eye view of street blocks and buildings from 4 different directions.
• Displaying multiple maps on one page on both Firefox and IE.

Give it a try at the map test page.
Screen Shot:

Download:

VirtualEarthMaps-0.6.zip

Installations and Instructions:

# Virtual Earth Maps
# (Movable Type Plub-In of Virtual Earth http://maps.live.com/)
#
# Author: Stanley Yao (http://stanblog.jojoyao.com)
# Created: March 10, 2007

Files in this plugin package
============================
-+
 +–plugins
 |   +–VirtualEarthMaps
 |       +–VirtualEarthMaps.pl
 +–mt-static
     +–plugins
         +–VirtualEarthMaps
             +–js
                 +–virtual_earth.js

Installation
============
* Copy the VirtualEarthMaps.pl file into <MTROOT>/plugins/VirtualEarthMaps/
  Create sub-directories as necessary.
  <MTROOT> is where your Movable Type software is installed.
* Copy the virtual_earth.js file into <MT_STATIC_ROOT>/plugins/VirtualEarthMaps/
  Create sub-directories as necessary.
  Here the <MT_STATIC_ROOT> (usually named "mt-static") is not necessarily
  inside your <MTROOT> directory.

Tags to be used to insert maps in your blog
===========================================
<$MTVirtualEarthMaps address="<ADDRESS>"
                     latitude="<LAT>"
                     longitude="<LONG>"
                     info="<INFORMATION>"
                     zoom="<ZOOM>"
                     style="<STYLE>"                     mode="<MODE>"
                     width="<WIDTH>"
                     height="<HEIGHT>"$>

"address" OR ("latitude", "longitude") specifies the location you want to map.
"info" is the extra description (e.g., restaurant name)
"zoom" is how detail the map is.  It can be from 1 through 19, the bigger the more detail.  Default is 15.
"style" can be "r" – "road view", "a" – aerial view, "h" – hybrid view, and "o" bird’s eye view.  Default is "r".
"mode" can be "2D" or "3D".  "3D" requires IE.  Default is "2D".
"width" and "height" specifies how big the map is.  Default is 300px by 300px.

Examples:
<$MTVirtualEarthMaps address="525 Bellevue Sq, Bellevue, WA"$>
<$MTVirtualEarthMaps address="525 Bellevue Sq, Bellevue, WA" info="P F Chang" zoom="16" style="r" width="500" height="400"$>
<$MTVirtualEarthMaps latitude="47.604439" longitude="-122.330081" style="r" zoom="15" width="400" height="400"$>
<$MTVirtualEarthMaps latitude="47.620858" longitude="-122.348891" info="Space Needle" style="h" mode="3D" zoom="15" width="500" height="400"$>

Showing maps in your blog entries
=================================
You need "Process Tags" plugin http://kalsey.com/2002/08/process_tags_plugin/.
See more details in Stefan Dembowski’s explaination http://www.sixapart.com/pronet/plugins/plugin/mtyahoomaps.html.

Thank:

The following resources have been very helpful:

• MSDN Virtual Earth Forum
• Via Virtual Earth
• Movable Type Developer Resource

Bug Report:

You can report bugs by either comment on this entry or send me email at .

This is a road-view 2D map:
<$MTVirtualEarthMaps address="525 Bellevue Sq, Bellevue, WA" info="P F Chang" zoom="16" style="r" width="500" height="400"$>

This is a hybrid 3D map of Space Needle viewing at 35 degree angle:
<$MTVirtualEarthMaps latitude="47.620858" longitude="-122.348891" info="Space Needle" style="h" mode="3D" zoom="15" width="500" height="400"$>

More Pictures Of Possible Google Phone?

Wireless platform would be the next battle field of searching. The day of "technology" is past. In those days computers and software were invented to help people do more things faster. Those things is mostly about information processing. Given a bunch of input and the computers will follow the instructions embedded in the software and produce the expected results. When network was invented to connect computers, it was about transmitting information faster on a much wider scope.

Today, with the already advanced computing and world wide web as the infrastructure, almost all computer technologies are about information and people. Finding the right intelligence and talents. Sitting in front of a desktop or looking for a Wi-Fi hot spot for laptop connection is not efficient enough. A more mobile and slim device is more desirable, so that information is right at the tip of people fingers. Integration of wireless devices and Internet services would be really attractive. I’m imaging the future information searching is pervasive. For example, when you are talking with your friend on the phone and trying to set up a time to go lunch together in a new restaurant. The wireless phone will extract keywords and address from your conversation and you could ask the phone to create this appointment by either pressing a button or saying some voice command. After confirming this appointment, map and driving direction is created too. And you could use it as a GPS to guide you to the venue.  With search-enabled wireless phone, you can also ask the phone to find the closest drug store or coffee shop just by talking.  The search-enabled phone could also be your assistant when you are talking with your friends.  When you do not agree with some ideas in your conversation, ask the phone to do a search on the fly and join your conversation by telling you what it found.

Like partnering with computer manufacturers to pre-install search tool bars on the new computers. Wireless is another competition field. Moto Q with Microsoft Windows Mobile is out there. But I think there is still a lot that can be improved to integrate with Internet services. I look forward to seeing what google phone will bring us.

Playing with mapping service API is a lot of fun, especially the Virtual Earth 3D maps, on which you can adjust altitude, heading, pitch and so on and pan through the city downtown over the skyscrapers.  Google map and Microsoft Virtual Earth has similar JavaScript/AJAX interfaces.  Tried the MTGoogleMaps plug-in and it’s quite good and easy to use.  There is one problem though when displaying, on IE, multiple maps by using multiple template tags on the same page.  The problem the tag will generate the same script-lets each time it appears on a page.  So there are multiple pairs of <div id="map"> and <script> in the resulting page, and the element ID of them are all the same – "map".  Although the element IDs are supposed to be unique across the page, but the browser will still try to render the page when there are ID collision.  However the result is not consistent on IE and Firefox.  Look at this example:

The above script-let will show "d1" and then "d2" on firefox, which suggests the space locality.  The closer element is picked when there are multiple elements with the same ID.  But on IE, "d1" will show up twice.

To fix this issue, firstly we need to move the <div> tag (hosting the map) generation into the client script so that we can generate tags with different IDs.  Secondly, use an array to keep track of all the map objects in case we need them later to further manipulate the maps.