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MGRS Layer for Google Earth – Offline!

Tuesday, June 19th, 2007

Thanks to help from Mark Ferneau, have finally the MGRS layer packaged up ready for use off-line (and GPL licenced!), an often requested feature.

These instructions assume Windows, and that you don’t have a local webserver running. The zip file should be usable to set it up on any local server capable of running PHP, just don’t forget to edit the link in the network link to the path of your webserver.

Without further ado, the instructions:

Download Appweb web server from: http://www.appwebserver.org/ (Tested with 2.2.0)
Install with the general default options
Save AppWeb.conf file in C:\program files\MBedthis Appweb\, overwriting the default (this just sets up the minimum needed for PHP to run, removing some of the extra stuff)
Copy php5ts.dll from C:\Program Files\Mbedthis Appweb\lib\modules\ to C:\Program Files\Mbedthis Appweb\bin\ (not sure why this step is required but Appweb seems to need it)
Extract grid_mgrs.zip into directory C:\appweb\web\offline_nearby\
Start up the appweb server, using Icon in Start Menu. (if itâ€™s already running, icon in System Tray, exit it)
Open the network link – save it to your My Places

If there is interest could possible package up some of the other layers run on a local webserver in a similar fashion.

Finally, use at your own risk, it works for us, but your mileage may vary. We welcome any and all feedback (esp. patches!)

Posted in Google Earth, KML, Nearby, network-link | 17 Comments »

GoogleDevelDay: part 2

Thursday, May 31st, 2007

Have how been to the two ‘Geo’ sessions, nothing new to report I don’t think that can’t be got from gearthblog.com and the Google Maps API Group (where I had already heard of these), but anyway a quick round up of the main announcements (in no particular order)

Maps API – Can now do Directions – don’t yet know how flexible the API is tho, or if it even supports UK
Maps API – hint that the Geocoder might work (or soon) in the UK, but this could just be the questionee doesnt know yet.
Google Maps – Mapplets – porting a mashup to Google Maps
Google Earth – New KML 2.2 – as far as I gather its the KML spec only, the viewer is not released yet – but will check.

Support for Photo Placemarks – of particular interest to Geograph – tried something like this with models but never got it nice enough to release.

Add ‘atom’esque, link and author tags to Placemark
Update: just found the Camera tag, YAY!
http://code.google.com/apis/kml/documentation/kml_tags_beta1.html

More as I find it out (I think I am missing some anyway…), I’ll also verify the facts and flesh out the features with links to more information.

Update: forgot to mention Ed Parsons also used the Geograph Mapplet demo in his Keynote speech this morning. (see previous posts)

Tags: gdd07, gdd07uk
Posted in Google Earth, Google Maps, KML, Uncategorized | Comments Off

@Google Developer Day

Thursday, May 31st, 2007

I think forgot to mention this before … just arrived in London for the Google Developer Day and waiting for it all to begin, hopefully will post a followup later one, once have something to report (other than might be a video about the event !)…

oh… and jusw saw in the comments that the mapplet just posted was used in Google’s talk at Where2.0

Tags: gdd07, gdd07uk
Posted in Google Earth, Google Maps | Comments Off

RSS & GeoRSS to KML

Monday, April 30th, 2007

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…

Posted in Experimental, geonames, GeoRSS, Google Earth, Google Maps, KML, Nearby, PHP, RSS, Web Services | 1 Comment »

Smooth Zooming on a Google Maps with a SpaceNavigator

Tuesday, March 27th, 2007

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.

Posted in Experimental, Google Earth, Google Maps, SpaceNavigator | Comments Off

Geograph Superlayer v2

Thursday, March 15th, 2007

Following the recent introduction of the Superlayer to explore Geograph Photographs in Google Earth, have updated so that transitions between ‘levels of detail’ are much nicer, as well as sporting new custom icons!

If you have previously downloaded it then you should get the update automatically – otherwise right click the superlayer in My Places and select ‘refresh’ to fetch the latest version. It seems sometimes GE doesn’t reload the styles – so if all you see is a mass of yellow push-pins, restart GE and it should then return to nice circles and blue camera icons.

Or just download it here:

Geograph Superlayer (Google Earth Version 4+ REQUIRED)

Posted in Experimental, Geograph, Google Earth, Location Links, network-link, SuperLayer | 2 Comments »

Geograph SuperLayer for Google Earth

Monday, March 12th, 2007

If you have Google Earth version 4 and broadband then you might be interested in clicking this link:

Â· Geograph SuperLayer Â·

By opening the above link you should be able to view the whole Geograph image collection directly in Google Earth. This has been possible in a number of ways for a while, but this does so in a much more compelling way (i.e. a single small download!).

This exploits the new Region functionality of GE4 to only fetch and load detail as you zoom in, in this way the view starts depicting a course overview of the current coverage, zooming in reveals more detail until pictures themselves become visible. (the ‘Super’ is adopted from Google’s term of SuperOverlays – overlays that load via nested regions)

In particular this is all pre-compiled and compressed, so should be fairly quick to download and is friendly as possible on bandwidth. Overall the layer consists of 102,965 files at 450MB compressed so there is a lot of data available, however you will download a lot less than this, probably on the region of a couple hundred files totalling about 2MB in a typical session.

As a small refinement, when a icon represents a single photo (a camera icon) if a view direction is stored the icon will have the top point in the appropriate direction. Also once the thumbnail is visible you can double click the thumb and the View will rotate to orientate the photo correctly!

Also this is only the first version, hot off the presses, so it not perfect yet, in particular would like to use Geograph specific icons (any Graphic Designers reading???), for example to give more feedback to the user on squares with many images, and view direction – also GE sometimes gets confused at the amount of detail available – plan to experiment to see if something can do about that.

… Hopefully users of GE3 should degrade nicely to use the View-based refresh method of viewing the dataset.

Oh and yes this is the little kml project I mentioned, see also other ways of loading geograph data into Google Earth or Google Maps via KML files.

Posted in Geograph, Google Earth, Google Maps, KML, PHP, SuperLayer | 3 Comments »

KML writing PHP Class

Tuesday, March 6th, 2007

For a little project working on for Geograph (btw Second Birthday today!), that will end up producing quite complex (and repetitive) KML, I decided to take the plunge and create my own abstraction class.

There are already a few of these about, but I wanted something with just enough abstraction so don’t need xml in the php code, but without too much complexity, or a whole new syntax to learn. So the final output is basically a generic XML creation system, but tailored to KML generation, with a number of convenience methods for common bits of KML, (like outputting the right headers). This don’t do any schema enforcement, and assumes a good working knowledge of kml.

Anyway as the code is already GPL, thought would mention it here in case it useful to someone else.

Get the base class here (from the Geograph SVN repository)

There is also another file here, which extends basic the functionality, this is more specific to Geograph, but could still be useful.

And a few demo’s/tests used during development:

Demo1 – (view running demo – by default displays the KML, option to open in GE)
Demo2 – (view running demo)

And for a real world use of the code (been in active use for a week now)

Eagle eyed viewers might notice it claims kml2.0 but then goes on to allow use of 2.1 features. Yes I know this is ‘bad’ but is with reason. I have found to my expense that using 2.1 as the version actually has a few undesirable effects, eg making the Document visible in My Places tree, can’t mix and match styleUrl and style (to have common style but with a unique icon), and a few other subtle things. Whereas GE seems to allow the new features in a 2.0 kml file, I guess this is the GE equivalent to quirks and strict mode. (disclaimer: it’s a while since I tested this, so might be old news, I really should run some real world tests to confirm this is still the case)

Posted in Code, Experimental, Geograph, Google Earth, KML, PHP | 3 Comments »

Google Earth Version Stats (Mar’07)

Tuesday, March 6th, 2007

A while ago I compiled statistics of the versions of Google Earth in use in the wild (well technically accessing network links at nearby.org.uk) – well an updated version is now available.

For comparison here is the version from last Sept.

Conclusion: GE3 is definitely on the way out, but still actively used. A large number of people haven’t updated their GE4 for a while, and there might be a new version coming out sometime soon.

Update: It turns out my simplistic test for useragents beginning with kh_ missed off Mac and Linux clients – so here is a another updated version that does include such clients. Thanks to a commenter on Gearthblog for spotting this!
(I could rerun the above reports but see little point)

Update 2: It seems the new version was incorrectly calculating the total for Mac/Linux users – updated the link in the update above to correct this.

Posted in Google Earth, Nearby, network-link | 1 Comment »

Camp Hill Clump PhotoSpots

Saturday, February 17th, 2007

As a slight variation this time, this is actually a group of three Panoramic Images, all taken quite close together…

Open in Google Earth:

Inside the Trees (341kb)
The Trigpoint (276kb) - you expected that right
Down the Path (489kb)

This set presented a special challenge in locating the photos, because as well as absolute accuracy in placing the set (thanks to the trigpoint!), also needed to get the relative positions correct – in step some Getmapping imagery.

More Links for this location

Posted in Google Earth, PhotoSpot | Comments Off

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