MSN …ehr… Live Local Virtual Earth 3D (Beta)

Apparently it’s live. A 3D extension to the map search of live.com which lets you fly through their maps like a bird.

Of course I wanted to:

See brand new, amazing 3D views that make using maps more exciting than ever.

No need to tell you this is IE 6/ IE 7 only. But a few install screens down the road I got the warning that my locale wasn’t supported. Argh… couldn’t that particular piece of detection not be done in advance? Or let me install anyway so I could view the skylines of US-only cities?

Thus for the moment no ‘review’, but there are plenty to be found around the web. Although I wouldn’t want to call it a ‘Google Earth killer‘ yet.

Oh and BTW: Why does Live.com keeps thinking I understand Spanish?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 1:28 am and is filed under Search, MSN Search, News, Development, Internet Explorer, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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3 Responses to “MSN …ehr… Live Local Virtual Earth 3D (Beta)”

1. Alan Grossmith Says:
   January 14th, 2008 at 12:51 am

   Hi,

   I have tried to find on the net any detail as to why live.com/maps is great on a pc (birds eye views etc) but when you go to the same address on an apple mac it is some dreadful version of a directory enquiry. Have Microsoft yet again got it in for apple mac owners? Does anyone out there no the answer as could not find it on the net? Many thanks.
   Alan Grossmith

2. Caspar Says:
   January 15th, 2008 at 1:00 am

   It probably has to do with the reliance on the .NET framework. Which isn’t available for OSX (ignoring the Mono framework).

3. SpaceCat85 Says:
   February 23rd, 2008 at 4:30 am

   It doesn’t seem to work on Macs because of User Agent sniffing. This isn’t the preferred solution, but if you change your browser’s user agent to one for a Windows version of Firefox 2, it’ll give you the “nice” version with Bird’s Eye View. If you need to manually enter in settings into the User Agent Switcher extension for Firefox or similar, these will work:

   User agent string:
   Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0
   App name: Netscape
   App version: 5.0 (Windows; en-US)
   Platform: Win32

   If you’re using Safari, you can enable a “Debug” menu via Tinkertool or a Terminal command and use the “Firefox 2.0″ option in the User Agent part of that menu.

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