Microsoft announced that it has made some changes to Bing Maps. Changes include the color of the navigation bar, draggble routes, zoom bar changes, command parsing, embedding, dynamic computing, new navigation, speed, and Bing Maps will no longer stop at the international date line, but will wrap around the world continuously.

Draggable routes is arguably the most significant change to Bing Maps. "This is a great (and much requested) feature added to Bing Maps allowing you to generate a route, then in the case that you need to change the route, you can simply grab any part of it and drag it to where you want the route to actually go," says Microsoft’s Chris Pendleton. "To use draggable routes, click the directions link in the welcome pane or the car icon near the bottom of the welcome pane. Enter a start and end, generate a route, then grab anywhere on the route to move the route line. The route will regenerate for you."

With the zoom bar, you can now jump to specific zoom levels rather than just zooming in and out, and if you want driving directions or traffic info, you can enter specific commands in the search box like "Bellevue, WA to Space Needle" or "Seattle Traffic."

You can now embed maps onto blogs or sites by clicking the share button when the map is where you want it to be. You can then copy the code or click the "customize view" link to bring up the embeddable map customizer.

As far as navigation, there is a new selection of features on the button bar with the following: 

- "Welcome" loads the welcome pane

- "Car" loads driving directions

- "Star" loads My Places, formerly called Collections

- "Envelop" loads the ability to share the map with someone via email, copy a URL or embed the map into a web page

- "Printer" is for printing

- "Traffic light" will load the traffic overlay

"We’ve moved the processing power closer to the user," says Pendleton. "Using Microsoft’s ECN, we now have Bing Maps running in data centers in 7 locations around the world. This means wherever you are around the world, you will access Bing Maps from the closest geographic node to where you are physically located."

In addition to that, the default Bing Maps home page dropped from 678kb to 484kb and Pendleton says it "zips through the pipes" much faster now.

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