manningtree

Max is a app that demonstrates WPF, as in Windows Presentation Foundation, now part of .Net 3.0. Originally (at least when I saw Max at PDC ‘05) Max was orientated at photo sharing and viewing, with some neat gallery style presentation modes (or Mantles). Now the Max team, have rolled out a version that supports news reading (RSS and Atom feeds) using a very nice dynamic document layout in the content rendering panes.

Here’s a quick look at the m a n n i n g t r e e atom feed as rendered in Max…

max Hosted on Zooomr

and, while we’re about it, here’s some recent c r o s s o a k piccy’s as displayed in the Max Mantle view.

max.mantle Hosted on Zooomr

You can download max from microsoft.com/max

Technorati tags: microsoft, max, news, reading, wpf, photo

The news is out.

If you’re quick you can still see my piccy on the company photo page. In case you’re slow, here’s a copy for posterity

ggphotos Hosted on Zooomr

Martin has taken over as CTO – which is great news for Global. As for me, I’m off to Microsoft, so I’ll need to update the context blurb in the side panel…

Oh, and how odd that it should come out the same day as the news from James?

So, finally flickr has added geotagging capabilities. I’m not really complaining about the lack of the feature – when I signed up for a pro account I did so because of the then feature set, not because of expectations or promises of stuff to come. It’s more that the geobloggers site disappeared shortly after Dan got hired to flickr and, well, a flickr replacement has been a while coming. Some might say that potential competition from zooomr had a part in pushing things along, other’s might say that these things just take time. I just say that there’s been a certain amount of anticipation…

Anyway, Flickr now supports geotagging via the Flash-based organiser tool, and a very nice geotagging UI, and a very nice use of Flash, it is too. In fact I was just about to say how nice the UI was compared with Zooomr’s similar feature when I realised how desolate the mapping is for bits of the UK. It might just be than Yahoo’s mapping used in Flickr just had a bad day with Aylsham, and that this example is not indicative of the level of detail elsewhere. I would check, but Flickr is currently down for a massage (cue reminder to self: another advantage of living on GMT is that Flickr downtime is usually when I’m sparko).

Anyway, here’s what I mean about Aylsham in Flickr’s geotagging UI…

flickrgeotakuk Hosted on Zooomr

…there’s not a lot there is there? And when I zoomed in further, I got the grey screen of, well, I don’t know really. I guess with a GSOH they could have used ‘Here be monsters’.

If you want to see what Zooomr’s Google Maps-based detail is like, take a looksee at how the screen shot is geotagged on Zooomr.

And for completeness, here’s Aylsham in live.local.com…

So I’m not altogether sure about Flickr’s geotagging. First impression: nice feature, shame about the map set. Next steps, look some more at non-North American tags.

Footnote: I’ve just tried maps.yahoo.com and that only has US and Canada; maps.yahoo.co.uk redirects to maps.yahoo.net and, after jumping through Java applet hoops, throws up a more detailed map of Aylsham than Flickr has. Maybe Yahoo has different mapping data sets? I’m sure a search engine could tell me if I had the inclination to look.

Aside: I’ve just had an email from British Airways that redirects to a page promoting Google Earth.

Footnote: the comments on Mike’s techcrunch post pretty much sum up the situation for non-North Americans.

Question: does this mean that Flickr should quit with the non-English greetings on the home page?

Technorati tags: flickr, zooomr, geotag, geotagging, yahoo, maps