Wednesday, February 18, 2009

BruTile on the Microsoft Surface

Last month I had the fortune to work on one of the first Surfaces shipped to Europe. To test the Surface SDK we wrote a basic map application with pan an zoom through touch.

Using the Surface SDK's ScatterView control it was very easy to get some touch controlled objects on the app, like a layer control. For panning and zooming we had to do a little bit more work, since we are not moving the map control itself but need to redraw the content instead. For this purpose the SDK provides the ManipulationProcessor. It is a little bit more coding but the documentation explains nicely how to do it. To top it off we added a little throw effect using the InertiaProcessor.

Our first meeting with the Surface was very enjoyable. The SDK met all our needs so far. Here is a little movie colleagues Steven and Martijn made of our first app.



2 comments:

Richard Monson-Haefel said...

I've been working with a couple of mapping solutions for Surface: MapDotNet and VirtualEarth vis MapPoint. I would like to try out your API. Do you plan to make the Surface specific code available? I would love to try it out and hopefully contribute back some code or bug fixes or whatever.

Thanks,

Richard

Paul den Dulk said...

Richard, you probably already found out, but the surface specific code has also been added to the BruTile repository.

Paul