Dear Mike,

I saw today a "Satellite Map" section at weather.com.
Maybe it is not something new, but it looks nice and it seems to use Microsoft Digital Earth as a data source.

Could it be possible to have the same feature in WW?

Have you tried adding it with WW's Map Manager?

http://image.weather.com/web/flash/FMMain.swf

It is fun to play with.

EdP, I tried to add it... doesn't work for me. It looks like TWC is somehow blocking the request depending on how you access the Flash map.

The link works from the forum but the WW Map window doesn't.

And with the new WW window attribute providing WW menu links everywhere on the window trying to access the base IE functions like Properties and View>Source are not possible.

However, when I manually added the Satellite Map to my MapsHistory.ww file and recycled WW the entry did not show up in my WW Map History window!!

"[Test] TWC Beta Satellite Map","http://image.weather.com/web/flash/FMMain.swf"

I think the problem lies closer to home.

Maybe looking at http://www.weather.com/common/flash8MapUtil.js will help.

I use the following link as the map URL in Map Manager to bring up the interactive map. Of course, you'll need to change the lat & long to suit your location. You might also want to turn off the animation if you have low bandwidth.

http://image.weather.com/web/flash/FMMa ... Start=true

Let me know how it works!

Ahh, if we could make that the desktop background - I'd love to see an interactive map as the background on my Vista computer, and be able to do so as well in XP....

I don't think Windows supports active gifs for wallpapers let alone a Flash app.

But Vista *does* support active (read: animated) content for screen savers. Just not the way that XP supported Active content.

I went searching for this a while back - what kewl way to have a screensaver running than one that showed live Doppler radar of my area? But I haven't found an answer yet, and I cannot figure out a way to script a DreamScene so that the content is updated on the fly. Yet.

Hence, my wish for them to extend the feature to the desktop. An animated image, while taking up some serious resources, would actually be a good thing...

It does indeed work. Thank you.

BTW On the TWC site they use viewPortWidth=600&viewPortHeight=405.

I also found that scaling works well. I tried these two:

viewPortWidth=900&viewPortHeight=608

viewPortWidth=750&viewPortHeight=506

with no problem.

FWIW I have found that the Height:Width ratio doesn't have to be 4x6. The map itself is fixed, the only thing that changes is the view of it. Thus

viewPortWidth=900&viewPortHeight=400

displays just as well as any other combination. So adjust the values to whatever fits your needs.

jfedorko, thanks for the link

I have access to the latitude and longitude, so I'll have to include this map in Weather Watcher somehow. I could add it as the first map in the map dropdown list. Thoughts anyone?

I like the idea - I too have access to lat/ long and could eaily tailor it for my area as well.

johngalt, I was thinking of allowing map URLs to use [LATITUDE] and [LONGITUDE] tags to automatically inject that information into the map URLs when they are launched. That would allow a generic map URL to be used for any location in the world -- as long as the map supported an geographic location.

funny, I was going to suggest something similar, if it were possible programmatically. So, I guess ti is, and you have already thought of it. Obviously, I like it and say a resounding "Yes!"

The following build will allow you to use [LATITUDE] and [LONGITUDE] in your map URLs. After installing this build, update the weather once before attempting to open a map using these tags. I just added those two pieces of data to the data processing procedure, so you won't have that data until after the first weather update.

Download Weather Watcher 5.6.23g

What other tags can we use with map URLs???