local.live.com - Version 3 released

Microsoft have just released version 3 of their local.live.com platform.

From the ViaVirtualEarth.com blog:

'This release includes a number of improvements such improved searching, print support, traffic data, and shared collections. The team have also expanded international coverage, including birds eye imagery in the UK and street level mapping for Western Europe, Australia and a few other areas. We will be releasing a number of new articles over the weekend regarding development on the new platform. Luckily, the v3 servers are fully compatible with any v2 mashups you have already developed. Stay tuned!'

Out and about...(1)

I have been engaged in some interesting conversations lately, I recently had the pleasure to meet Wayne Smith who 'heads-up' the Microsoft Expression Webdesinger product,(Previously known as 'Quartz'). He is clearly passionate about his product and at first glance I can see why, I will be looking in detail at the Community Technology Preview (CTP), available for download (A whole month ahead of schedule?). The free trial will expire in February of 2007.

Earlier this year, Eric Meyer commented about the web design software in his Mixed Impressions post about his experience at MixO6, click here to read more.

Microsoft offers a preview of the software features at Web Designer Product Tours and Demos and more info at the Features link.
Microsoft has also set up a Discussion Forum.

re:merged.com

I am pleased to announce the soft launch of an exciting new project that I am involved in - 're:merged'.

I have been extremely fortunate and managed to hook-up with some other industry experts, together we are creating a community site enabling designers to showcase their ideas. re:merged is focussed on the new wave of interaction design, commonly described as ‘Web 2.0’. If you want to gatecrash the party and mix it with developers that strive to create amazing content then we sincerely hope that you will jump on-board.

re:merged.com was born on May 1, our mission is to catalyze the fusion of designers and developers, enabling version 2.0 to be everything that version 1.0 dreamt about.

live.com image search

I've been playing around with the live.com 'beta' image search, I use the google image search untold, so was excited to see a 'webtop' search in action. First impressions - very nice;-)

Simply beautiful...

...creative programming; is there nothing the poly9 boys can't do on a map? Checkout their ascii maps.