New Microsoft Service was released: Windows Live Local. It’s basically replaced MSN Virtual Earth. Some may say it’s a duplicate of Google Maps, but there’s several features that I like better about it. Well, first, lets get off the bad things. It has problems with Firefox, which basically limits my usage on it. But one of the best thing is the bird’s eye view. It appears they sent planes or helicopters across many metropolitan cities and tooks pictures of it so you have a better zoom which is awesome! It’s awesome that I can see my backyard and even my car tent in front of my garage back home in Monterey Park. Other neat features I found is the middle click which allows you to draw a rectangle which it will then zoom into. I’ve always HATED the magnify glass cause I would usually have to zoom multiple times to get it to just the area I want. But now with the box zoom, problem solved! One last thing is the right click feature. Ever seen a map and knew you wanted to go to point x but you didn’t know the address, so you had to give an intersection or something to get to the correct place. I never really got why this feature wasn’t implemented in the 1st place. I know where I want to go on the map. I don’t know the exact address. Give me the directions to it. Well, it’s now just as simple as a right click and selecting Drive To, Drive From, or Add Pushpin. If you have time, might want to give a test drive. Checking out the city in bird’s eye view was definitely really fun.
By the way, did you get a chance to play with the printing. Oh my god! It’s so much better than any other mapping service that I’ve seen. In the print options, it gives me quite a few things I’ve always wanted. Who the heck needs all the directions for getting from one’s house to the freeway or vice versa? Windows Live Local allows to omit parts of the directions if you don’t need them, which ends up saving paper and not having to go through 13 directions when you only need the last 4. Another great feature is the options of printing the route map, route summary, directions, and/or notes. In the route map, you can select 2 different map styles, and 3 different map sizes. Next to each direction is a checkbox if you want to include a small detail map next to it. So if a map like driving from point A to point B of a freeway isn’t needed, you can turn that map off but leave others on. I can’t believe Microsoft actually did something so much better this time.
If you don’t like all these confusing options, they have 3 default presets:
- Print the map and directions
- Print the directions only
- Print the map only
which should be plenty easy for you.