Bing Maps (Microsoft)

The only reason I used Bing Maps was the excellent obliques of major towns and cities which covered many airfields and other interesting sites. These have now gone! Yet another improvement to the user experience.

They have opted to ditch all the old stuff and replace it with - nothing, or so it seems. I cannot get the new version to work where the option is available via right hand click on the map.

No doubt the UK hasn't been covered yet or I have failed to understand something. It also mentioned the new views are available on "cards" but offered no explanation as to what these were. This is a great loss as it showed many airfields before major demolition. It also included many fuel depots and a couple of bombing ranges. The latter I have taken screen grabs of in the past but the fuel depots I have not yet tackled. Now I never will!

I have no idea what happened to the stock of photos but I hope the likes of Google have purchased them. Yet again the internet reinforces my policy of downloading everything before it goes!

I wonder how long it will be before they drop Bing?

It appears that the obliques are back or are working again. Although a bit more of a challenge than before they do seem to work on the right hand click and selecting birds eye, assuming there is coverage of the selected area.

The zoom is not as useful in that you can't zoom out to navigate to another nearby area like the old version. It is also not as large a zoom range. It is difficult to know what coverage is like as on the old system you could zoom right out to see the areas covered.

The one of our house, though better quality, is about three or four years old. We had regular photo runs over our house this summer, usually a twin with multiple parallel runs. I wonder who that was? Getting them some evenings recently, no doubt spying on how much energy we are leaking.

Anyone remember the blokes that used to knock on your door and offer a print of your house? These were usually low level obliques. A Neighbour bought one in the eighties and it was quite good showing his in the centre of a three house shot. Can't recall the price.

I was looking at the Bing link to the gun platform at Filton posted by Carnaby a few years back. Sadly the gun platform has been updated and now shows a building site. However twiddling with rotation and moving about a bit there is one view remaining of the site with the gun tower in situ! It was ruddy difficult to replicate too.

Recently Binging (new verb a la Google) showed that despite the "improvements" there is still some old stuff on there and even some of the new stuff that doesn't appear when you right hand click. Sadly it leaps around too much for my liking so I don't use it as much now. Sadly in IT improvements are a bad thing as frequently demonstrated by Microsoft.

Also found out that searching for Bing on the forum returned just about every post or topic, even if you include spaces before and after and put it in quotes! So apart from being a stupid name it is impractical for use on the web.