Comments on: A Virtual Earth to Google Maps Transition: From Idea to Deployment In a Few Weeks

By: HID Light

HID Light — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 03:54:46 +0000

Great article write now.Thanks for information on topic.

By: Robbie

Robbie — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 16:32:47 +0000

FYI – The current VE release has custom layer support: http://blogs.msdn.com/virtualearth/archive/2009/04/09/virtual-earth-api-release-information-april-2009.aspx

By: Rob

Rob — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:59:03 +0000

y is google maps & earth so out of date

By: Rwanda « Honeysun

Rwanda « Honeysun — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:39:44 +0000

[...] before starting this trip, released a new version of the website. One interesting change is that Redfin switched from using Microsoft’s Virtual Earth maps to Google Maps. The motivation for the change was performance: Redfin found a way to draw all those home-for-sale [...]

By: anneterob

anneterob — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 09:33:51 +0000

Hi, cool site, good writing

By: Treapletroulp

Treapletroulp — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 09:52:01 +0000

Im trying to locate a pair of H.I.D bulbs for my wife's 1993 Acura and was wondering if anyone had any guidance? We have researched and read on these websites for specifications but any first hand information would be really helpful. hid light

By: Bonnie

Bonnie — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 23:02:41 +0000

This is a really great post! I stumbled on it trying to solve the problem of a low-cost DESKTOP api for mobile computer systems (in-vehicle).

What I find interesting are the parcel polygons from ParcelStream. Although the overlay intermittently fails to completely draw on zoom, a quick refresh does the trick, and the data is very attractive!

I did a POC converting shapefiles in ArcGIS to kml to show existing GIS data can be displayed on a Google map. It worked, but I was really dissatisfied with the graphic quality, especially when zooming in; the lines dissolved into gigantic pixel blobs. Coarse and choppy would be an understatement.

I am curious; What is the source of the city boundaries? TIA!

By: Angus Davis

Angus Davis — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 02:00:42 +0000

I read this post with interest a few weeks ago. Then today, I stumbled across this blog post:
http://viswaug.wordpress.com/2008/12/18/creating-a-lean-and-fast-custom-marker-overlay-for-google-maps/

… in which a guy named Vish discusses a method he learned about to solve this problem from Pamela Fox. I wonder if Redfin used this approach, or something different?

Vish says: “The sample below illustrates how to create a light weight custom marker GOverlay for Google maps that is REALLY FAST. And it allows for a multitude of customizations as you see fit. … The demo below also allows you to check out the performance of the custom overlay with large number of markers loaded.”

Anyway, since several folks in these comments complained about not hearing how redfin solved the problem, I thought it would at least be worth pointing to this other fellow. I have never built anything in Google Maps so I don’t know much, but I do know that no company has a monopoly on smart people. Maybe this Vish guy is onto something.

By: Grank

Grank — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 21:27:41 +0000

This post is sorta frustrating for me.
I’m used to working with VE and being able to add large numbers of points without performance difficulty. My latest client made GMaps a requirement instead, and using the out of the box google API, I literally cannot accomplish what the client has requested due to the poor performance with large numbers of points. I’m already clustering pins into groups when zoomed out to improve performance, but that doesn’t help as we zoom in; unlike VE, GMaps performance seems like it’s degrading with many points on the map at the same rate regardless of whether or not they’re visible in the map’s bounds. The last couple of zoom levels become almost unusable.
I was surprised by that, and sought more information; this post came up in my search for performance comparisons between the two mapping systems…
I think it’s a little disappointing to acknowledge that the Google Maps API has major performance issues with lots of stuff on the map when compared to Virtual Earth, and then turn around and say “no problem! We fixed it and now Google Maps is several seconds faster than Virtual Earth”… and put up performance graphs lauding the increase over VE and everything…
…but do it by having to code your own custom GOverlay, effectively re-writing yourselves the functionality that was slow in the original API.
And then not post any code or any implementation details or clues.
It’s good to know that it can be fixed and that people out there have fixed it, but I hope that Redfin will consider releasing the source code soon, or at least discussing some of the details so that someone else could reproduce something similar for the community.
In the meantime, I guess I’ll have to try to hack around it myself. Maybe that in-bounds thing I mentioned above is where I should start? Or can you give us any other clue?

By: Sasha

Sasha — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 16:56:37 +0000

@mike ridgeway: What do you mean by “half of the map is missing”? If you’re seeing errors, please send us a screenshot of what you’re seeing to techsupport@redfin.com and we’ll try and figure out what’s going on. Thanks!