Tasty Taste of Chicago Map?
West Monroe Partners built the app using Microsoft Azure (cloud services) and Sliverlight. And, no, there’s no Bing Maps for Enterprise involved, this is a “cartoon” map of the annual food expo.
While it’s very pretty, I wanted more interaction. The left hand side offers a “table of contents” of events by day or food vendor (alphabetical). Click on a date and the events for that day are listed on the right and highlighted on the map. Click on a vendor and the map “zooms there” and provides details. Want to see what the vendor next to it is by clicking on the map? Nope, can’t do that. Want to click on the “ticket” symbol to learn about how much tickets are? Nope, can’t do that. Want to click on anything on the map for more information? Nope, can’t do that. Clicking on the map seems to enable only panning and zooming. Frankly, I wanted to click on stuff! In more practical terms, I want to know which food vendors are near the shows I want to see. Alas, the map doesn’t allow that (at least not easily).
(Oh, and I tried it on both Mac/Safara and WinXP Firefox, just to be sure it was no “just a Mac thing.”)
