FEATURE — Edge Pointers, Similar to World of Warcraft's Minimap, for Nearby Items Off-Screen

Question

Is there a special class of map indicators in the Bing Maps control that indicate Nearby Items Off-Screen (at a certain % distance)?

Something like in World of Warcraft, where it's easy to spot in the Minimap significant places to go to.

Regards,
thenonhacker

Answer 1

No - the inbuilt classes draw pushpin markers only when they are contained within the visible map view. It's a good idea though, and (probably) wouldn't be too hard to implement as a custom module.

The main problem would be that the position of the nearby markers would have to be recalculated on every frame as the map moved. While this is also true of markers in the map itself, the relationship is much simpler and has already been optimised by the control (i.e. the map moves left 5 pixels, every pushpin marker on the map moves left 5 pixels) - this is not necessarily true when markers are off-screen. This might lead to issues if you were drawing a lot of markers.

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twitter: @alastaira blog: http://alastaira.wordpress.com/

Answer 2

How about an open-source library that augments Bing for this feature?

Answer 3

Yes - this is exactly the sort of thing that could be added to http://bingmapsv7modules.codeplex.com/ , which already contains various modules to extend the functionality of the v7 AJAX control. All it needs now is somebody to code it  ;)

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twitter: @alastaira blog: http://alastaira.wordpress.com/