Tuesday 24 June 2008

Silverlight(DeepZoom)Earth (beta 3)

SilverlightEarth.com 2.0 beta (DeepZoom) now includes a new 'row' of functionality: latitude/longitude display, DeepZoom "zoom" factor display and a geocoding search:



It's not the most "full featured" search function - if zoom factor is less than '40' it will zoom to that level, otherwise it will preserve any higher 'power' of zoom. It might occasionally take you somewhere unexpected, as disambiguation isn't supported (yet).

You can also trigger a search from the querystring, so you can 'bookmark' a search, like this:

silverlightearth.com/2b2/?q=Golden Gate Bridge

or with zoom specified as well (note it's "DeepZoom Zoom Factor" and not your usual VE 1..18 range)

silverlightearth.com/2b2/?q=Seattle Space Needle&z=8000

"Reset" zooms back to the starting viewpoint. It seems I've broken the overlay with these changes - fix to come...

OT: this is one case where it's actually easier not to use DeepZoom - check out how much faster the Silverlight 1.0 version loads
silverlightearth.com/?q=Seattle Space Needle&z=16

UPDATE (25-Jun): Accepts both "Zoom Factor" AND "Tile Level"... if z < 18, z^2 is used as the "Zoom Factor", eg.
silverlightearth.com/?q=Sydney&z=16

Map selection is also supported from the URL, for example
silverlightearth.com/?q=Sydney&z=15&m=earthgt
The map 'codes' are backward compatible with Silverlight Earth 1.0.

Mapm=
Virtual Earth (road)earth
Virtual Earth (shade) earth2
Virtual Earth (satellite)earths
Virtual Earth (hybrid)earthh
Google (road) earthgr
Google (satellite) earthgs
Google (topo)earthgt
Yahoo (satellite)earthy
Blue Marbleearthbm
Moonmoon
Marsmars
The "q"uery can also be a simple latitude/longitude point, like this silverlightearth.com/2b2/?q=51.500151,-0.126236&z=12&m=earthg (or in SilverlightEarth 1.0).

Saturday 14 June 2008

Silverlight(DeepZoom)Earth (beta 2)

After reading these posts on using new Silverlight 2.0 beta 2 Deep Zoom functionality to utilise external tile pyramids (such as Virtual Earth) I decided to give it a go...

The sample code was pretty complete, I just added the Geoquery MapSources, and away it goes...

silverlightearth.com/2b2 (requires Silverlight 2.0 beta 2)


(screenshot a bit stylized to show the different map possibilities)

Okay, there's no searching/geocoding or other map niceties; and the DeepZoom shading (which works great for most things) is a little screwy on text-layers - you'll see what that means if you try it out. But it does work nicely, and puts my (still not finished) Silverlight 1.0 code to shame!

Monday 9 June 2008

Latest Searcharoo.net - images and geocoding

Searcharoo.net has been updated to version 6; which includes Jpeg image parsing, Gps latitude/longitude metadata and integration with Google Earth and Maps.



There's still a final round of testing to do before the article goes onto CodeProject, but it seems to work pretty well so far. Now, back to DeepZoom Publisher...

UPDATE 11-Jun-08: Image and Location Search(aroo) article now on CodeProject.