nearby.org.uk blog

Have finally got round to (almost) sorting a issue that has plaguing this site for a while, namely a lack of header/footer for site pages. Primarily from laziness, but also due to the mixmash of server scripting languages used to power Nearby. Anyway the upshot is can now relatively easily edit the top/bottom menu areas. So to celebrate there is now far more links at the top of the page.

Have also taken the opportunity to publish a revised homepage I tried creating a while ago, I am not totally happy with it but think it possibly an improvement (or at least a declutter) of the old one, sadly no new features released tho!
(yes this is the first time in over a year an a half have done substantial development in areas other than the Google Dabbles or GeographTools pages)

Purely as a prototype, here’s a little script that records your flight in Google Earth for later review. (Wondering how you fly in Google Earth? See (or) here!!!)

Go here for the details and to get started.

This is recording the flight back to on my server, as that’s way easier than creating a local application. However it does mean its dependent on the net connection and my server for smooth recording. If this works out will seek better hosting! As mentioned its only a technical preview so its nowhere near perfect, but should be useful in a fun way at least

… technically it could be used to record movement in any mode, however it only records the camera position, which is almost ideal for the flight simulator, but not so useful otherwise.

Wow, what an Easter Egg! (Yes check it not really the first of April…)

You can now enable a Flight Simulator Mode, find out more on GEarthBlog here.

Beware tho its kinda hidden and might take a bit of fiddling to get it to work… basically you hold down Ctrl-Alt-A (capital) on windows. However I found I had to change my language settings in Windows Control Panel to ‘English (United States)’, I had it set to UK English, and try as I might it wouldn’t work. Closing GE, changing the language setting, and reopening, it worked first time. You can even change back to UK and it will still be available in the Menus, but the keyboard shortcut no longer works. YMMV.

I’ve long been a fan of MS-FlightSim, and installed lots of packages to get high-resolution imagry and meshes (often to great expense!), to find this in GE is simply mind-blowing.

One last thing, as I’ve never been a fan of keyboard for flying (as the primary controls), I see the mouse works quite well, and is responsive and intuitive, thanks guys and gals!

What if the current view in Google Earth was quickly viewable in other maps, such as those made accessible by FlashEarth? Well, now it is. As you move around the globe a little white arrow follows you around, simple click it to get an approximation of the current view in FlashEarth in a popup balloon.

Open in Google Earth

Total credit to Valery35, for the concept (including a screenshot) on the Google Earth Community. (and to all the people made all the bits that could be pieced together in this 15min hack)

… I’m a lazy blogger, I don’t bother posting things I find, as I naively think people everybody will have already read it.

I’ve also just started using Google Reader in a bigger way, and as such as a small experiment will start sharing items I think are relevent to this blog, get the feed here:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/NearbyIsReading

(its via feedburner to make a nicer url, as well as to get some stats to see if it worth me doing this…)

(Very) Simplistic tool for trying out a OpenSearch Description file :

http://www.nearby.org.uk/opensearch/

… includes a Gmap to make defining the lat/long and/or bbox easy. (if the file has geo extensions)

(Just submit the same file again, if you update it. btw don’t submit a definition file you don’t want to become public, but remember it is called ‘open’

I realised after mentioning we updated the description file on www.geograph.org.uk, that it wasn’t fully tested, (hate testing, but not adverse to spending 2 hours scripting a tester), and in fact this tool highlighted a mistake!

Hope it of interest, feedback welcome,

Andrew over at highearthorbit.com recently put together a proposal for a Geo Extension to Opensearch.

Naturally I couldn’t not add it to the Geograph OpenSearch definition, will have to keep an eye on the logs to see if there is any take up…

This also reminds me that nearby.org.uk is in need of some loving, there are some datasets locked away within that could be made searchable (of course geographically!) in this way.
One thing that struck me reading the proposal, is that a method to specify geographical extents that the engine works with. Thereby a sane search initiator could know that searching Geograph for locations in Austrialia is likely to end in tears….

Something like a simple:

<opensearchgeo:extents>
<georss:box>49,- 9.5,62,2.3</georss:box>
</opensearchgeo:extents>

Would probably do it

Update: Sorry, just relised the tags didnt show up, seems TinyMce inside wordpress, decodes entities on its own, so double(!) encoding it is then.

Wow, Google have again gone and introduced an almost draw-dropping new feature to Google Maps - Mapplets. Put simply they allow you to create mini-map-mashups, but as they run on maps.google.com, visitors can view your content along side the normal content of Google Maps - but even more interestingly visitors can load more than one Mapplet at a time, combining the data from each mashup onto ONE map!!!

And it turns out they are really easy to code for been based on Google Gadgets (which I haven’t used before) and Google Maps API (which I have :)), but I also congratulate Google on including in the package ‘Developer’ mapplets that make developing relatively painless.

Anyway onto the demos, just visit http://maps.google.com/preview (it’s a Developer orientated demo for the moment), click the ‘Mapplets’ tab, goto ‘Add Content’ and see what takes your fancy. To try out my (very humble!) demo, use the ‘Add by URL’ and paste in the following URL: http://www.geograph.org.uk/stuff/gmapplet0.xml

(more about maplets in the post linked in the first paragraph!)

Spured on by comments on Stefan’s Ogle Earth blog, have created this little page as a wrapper to the excellent service provided by geonames.org to automatically convert a RSS feed to KML. It also does RSS->GeoRSS and GeoRSS->KML.

http://www.nearby.org.uk/rss-to-kml.php

Hopefully should make it a bit easier to load a (Geo)RSS feed into Google Earth in the style of a RSS feed - it auto updates.

… really need more to talk about, been kinda quiet of late…

A quicky: Nice little tweak of the 3Dconnexion control of a Google Map demo, thanks to an undocumented parameter it turns out it is possible to enable the Smooth (continuous) Zoom function from code, so now a new demo that has it enabled

As before IE only and required all sorts of hoop jumping to enable the activeX - but hopefully it worth it - still want to try the bookmarklet approach of loading this into any map.