I was checking the weather tonight to see if there was going to be any rain tomorrow morning (it appears that will be the case) and saw that Weather.com dumped their proprietary mapping and is now using Virtual Earth.
I had seen some Virtual Earth maps on Weather.com, but this is the first time I’ve seen it as the default map. It appears that Weather.com is using a Flash overlay on top of the Virtual Earth maps (double click on the map to see a cool zoom-in animation). The interface works really well and you can control the radar and cloud layers as well as the animation. And of course don’t forget you can also view the satellite image in the background if the road map isn’t your speed.
Compare the new maps to the “Classic” Weather.com graphics.
Quite an improvement! Kudos to the Virtual Earth team for getting their product out there. Shows what a more liberal licensing policy can do for a product. Can’t wait to see when they integrate VE3D into their maps. 3D clouds and rain falling should be pretty slick.
Update - The Virtual Earth (MapPoint) B2B Blog has some thoughts too.
9 responses so far ↓
1
Chad
// Feb 23, 2007 at 5:45 am
Great…. now I can NEVER see weather radar on a dialup :\
Well, still have intelecast..
2
J Wallis
// Feb 23, 2007 at 5:55 am
accuweather still delivers up good maps for the broadband impaired.
3
James Fee
// Feb 23, 2007 at 6:12 am
Dialup? What is this dialup you speak of?
4
Chad
// Feb 23, 2007 at 6:32 am
It is something most the US still has because telco’s don’t want to do any real work and expand their networks.
5
GeoZen
// Feb 23, 2007 at 6:45 am
Actually another website that the broadband impaired could use is http://www.wunderground.com, or even mobile.wunderground.com for a mostly text version.
6
Bill Dollins
// Feb 23, 2007 at 11:12 am
I was just using the “Map In Motion” feature last week and thought to myself that their whole mapping approach had been unchanged since the late 90s…
7
Hiero
// Feb 23, 2007 at 4:16 pm
w00t!! I grew up next to Brawley.
NOAA/NWS for dialup and forecasting from the horse’s mouth.
8
Chad
// Feb 23, 2007 at 4:33 pm
The new NOAA radar pages they put up a couple of months back are painfully slow on my connection.
Maybe by summer I can get wireless access at home.
9
Hiero
// Feb 23, 2007 at 5:52 pm
The ascii forecasts should pop up pretty quick though.
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