Archive for June, 2008

Letting your KML loose

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

I think I have mentioned this before, but have a page that helps share your KML file via various Google services.

Following a post on the Maps help group, realised could update it with some other ways to use the KML (even non Google!)

So view the latest page at

Publishing your KML for Google Earth, Google Maps and Beyond

suggestions for other links welcome in the comments!

Piclens viewer for Geograph

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

Piclens is an amazing program for very simply viewing photos full screen, in a fluid browser plugin, minimising distractions to focus on the photos. Really you have to try it for yourself to experience it, but below are a few screenshots, I highly recommend downloading it yourself, works on Internet Explorer, Firefox 2 and 3 amongst others. Even more interesting is thanks to the team at Piclens we have a special version that incorperates a Geograph search, so download Piclens using the special link below:

http://download.piclens.com/partner/aT78rK8wv9ML

If you already have it, it might ask to reinstall again.

Piclens screenshots
(click to enlarge – my graphics skills don’t do it justice)

Also of note the search box uses Geograph’s new experimental full text engine, so should be quick and intuitive to use… Also when viewing the search results, continues rightwards in a continuous 3D wall – no paging required.

As expected the piclens display page on Geograph still works, which can be used to visualise any standard results. Choose the ‘piclens’ option using the dropdown on the search page.

Stereoscopic (3D) Earth

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

Alerted by ogleearth to an interesting mashup with the new Google Earth Plugin, that promises Stereo viewing of earth I couldnt wait to get home to try on my windows machine….

However try as a I might I could not cross my eyes enough to see it in all its glory. So I copied* the code and made the size of of the globes configurable (well I first tried just changing the hardcoded value), and the result is:

stereo-earth.php?s=200

I found I can get it to work on 200pixels, any bigger and just couldnt manage it, but try it yourself (change the numbers in the url).

Another tip: press F11 to remove distracting screen clutter.

* The original Google demo is under the Apache licence, so assume the Stereoscopic version is too, so this one is also, although the PHP is rather boring.