In their continuing effort to expand their coverage and quality of their imagery, Microsoft just announced a huge (2 terabytes!) update to their Virtual Earth tile set. You can read more and see a list of improved areas here.

This is great news for UMapper users, as we provide the choice for which data provider your maps will use. As providers enhance coverage, you can choose the best tiles for the areas displayed in your maps.

As a first step towards making UMapper a truly international platform we extended our language support. We were able to successfully test Cyrillic and Latin character sets but we need more testing. Please help us test different languages by adding markers with titles in your native tongue to the Language Test map. We appreciate your help!

Yesterday AFComponents announced the version 1.0 release of the UMap Flash/Flex API. As some of you know, UMap is the secret weapon behind UMapper’s flexibility and universality. Along with several major functionality improvements and bug fixes, UMap 1.0 incorporates the Geonames.org geocoding service! This makes it easy for us to add search and geocoding into our map editor. With that said, look for cool new features in upcoming releases of UMapper.