Discussion: A new toy

Google Earth is pretty cool, but there's a new toy out there from he who must not be named and even you MSFT haters gotta admit, it's pretty darn good. Isn't competition a glorious thing?

Among other pluses, it works within the browser. Or at least within IE, which should be fine for everyone except the iconoclasts.

Check it out: http://local.live.com/. (*)

(local.live.com has been around for a while, offering superior basic mapping capabilities. The real-time 3D stuff is just built into that framework.)

* I'm j-man and I approve of this message.

I don't want to open can of worms, so, I'll keep low profile on any comments. But ... why, why MS can't design something which will work NOT only on IE like browsers. Sad. Really sad.

"To use this feature, open Live Local Search in Windows Internet Explorer version 6 or 7. For more information, and to download the latest version, visit the Microsoft Internet Explorer website (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/downloads/defa...)."

I would whine about it, too (I don't have IE installed) but... Apple sells all that fun music that only plays in iTunes. Everyone plays dirty. I love it.

Looked good until I found it doesn't appear to have feature of saving the map to a graphic image which could be imported into OCAD as a template. Can print but only to hard copy or pdf printer utility.
Also the image of the area where I live is several years old, unlike Google Earth which is almost current.

For a second there I thought Yahoo! had created an account on AP just to trash Microsoft! Imagine if AP pulled that much weight :)

Hey, I'm just reviewing the new toy for its utility to assist with my orienteering cartography.
If someone can find a "Save As" option for the map, please post it!
Australians had yahoos long before computers had Yahoo!.
"Young At Heart Older Orienteer"
"Yet Another Hopeless Old Orienteer"
You be the judge!

Did you try Print Scrn button and Edit - Paste in a photo editor?

Thanks. That or Alt-Print Scrn and Paste will create a screen image. But it is at screen resolution and you get everything in that particular window frame.
It works but is fiddley and resolution is not good enough to zoom in.

If you have image editing software you can zoom right in with your browser before taking screen shots and then paste them together in the image editing software. Somewhat tedious though …

Well, not to defend the evil empire, but it was actually Netscape that started the browser feature wars. The original version of IE was cloned from the Mozilla source (unlike the startup Netscape, MS wasn't too worried about getting sued by the University of Illinois) and was very compliant with the emerging HTML spec at the time. MS had to start adding features to stay competitive and things went to hell pretty quickly after that.

That said, I don't think it's entirely unreasonable for a company that supplies a free browser to require you to use said free browser when using another one of their free products.