Google Earth as a browser!

February 2nd, 2009

Just noticed the KML documentation website has been updated to reflect the KML extensions :)

But most interestingly note the <description> tag of balloons are now rendered by a webkit browser, one that supports JavaScript and iFrames!

WOW. Now goto to go and play with this, this could open up GE for more interactive content (like the plugin sort of offers) …

Update: also new: List of ‘GX’ extensions…
Other than the obvious touring language (which can even open balloons!), note it adds a new <gx:altitudeMode> to cope with underwater data (links with last post) , and even <gx:LatLonQuad> to cope with non rectangluar GroundOverlays!

Posted in Google Earth | 2 Comments »

Underwater Google Earth cables…

February 2nd, 2009

Besides the layers included in the new Earth Version 5 for Ocean data, I’ve just found this impressive collection:

Google Maps & Google Earth as visualization tools for marine data

Looks like much of this should load pretty well, one particully interesting (for me!) layer is “Submarine cables“. These load well in the new version, I’m guessing they will be updated in the future to work directly in new earth, but in the meantime you can change the data to underwater now!

  • Load a Layer as normal
  • Right click the top most folder of the layer eg “FT Submarine cables”, and slect Properties
  • Click the ‘Style, Color’ tab
  • Click ‘Share style’ button
  • Click the ‘Altitude’ tab
  • Change the dropdown to ‘Clamped to sea floor’ 
  • Press OK. 
and then zoom down to view the cables laying on the sea floor!
You can see how the cable routes do actully follow the underwater tarrain… :)

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Posted in Google Earth | 1 Comment »

GE5. The Ocean – Time Machine – Tour Recorder – oh and Mars

February 2nd, 2009

Seems reports that Google Ocean where pretty accurate, Google have just released Google Earth v5, which besides the extra Sea floor data we saw last week, it actully makes the sea transparent so you can fly underwater… (not to mention a new ‘Ocean’ set of layers)

But thats not all, there are a wealth of other features…

  • Historic data, – you can now turn back time, and view older imagary. The data base is pretty comprensive – and quick! – but I guess (hope!) that more data will be added too…. 
  • Touring – From a couple of quick plays, GE5 has a new tour recording mode. Very easy to use, and seems to even capture changes to places (found by accident, correction: its “places” only, doesnt capture “layers” :( ), and even changes to the time slider
  • Planetry Bodies – The old ‘sky’ button is now a dropdown – with the addition of Mars. Its been possible to view mars imagry for a while, but its now in glorious 3D! (and gets its own set of layers) 
  • Update: Richer HTML balloons – now balloons are rendered by a webkit browser, with Javascript and iFrames support! (more in a later post)

other minor changes…

  • More sun – the sun works for not just the past 24 hours now it seems. 
  • New Timeslider – To ammonodate the new imargy and sun, the slider has been redesigned and moved. It even glows showing historic imagery, but its little difficult to get to grip – (update: not too bad with some practice! – perhaps it was just slow before…)
  • Overview Map moved – its now behind the Google Logo! Guess that saves space….
  • Update: Support for non rectangular groundoverlys. (more)
  • KML Extensions - When copying KML out of the client it starts with:

<kml xmlns=”http://www.opengis.net/kml/2.2″ xmlns:gx=”http://www.google.com/kml/ext/2.2″ xmlns:kml=”http://www.opengis.net/kml/2.2″ xmlns:atom=”http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom”>

so it looks like extra stuff there – the new tours seems to be the main thing added in the gx namespace. Find out more about the Google Extensions Namespace: (more in a later post). Looks like this is going to be the way Google specific updates to KML is going to be handled now KML is controlled by OGC. 

Update(s): 

re KML namespace: making a few play tours and copying out the KML, the ‘touring language’ seems very comprehensive, recorsds small changes to view as a bunch of <Camera>, and pauses. Also only just noticed a ‘mic’ button, gonna have to dig out a microphone to try it… (I guess it can record a soundtrack for the tour)

Oh of course, there are plenty of further readings… GearthBlog 1 2, Google LatLong, Offical Google Blog. Offical site 1, 2. Oh more about the gx extension namespace: Brian Flood

Looking at the screenshots on gearthblog, my sea doesnt look like that its all static , I guess I need a better graphics card….

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Posted in Google Earth | 1 Comment »

A transformation?

January 19th, 2009

Looking back over the last few posts, it would seem I turning into a Google hater, I certainly seem to be finding more to fault, which seems a change from my previous fanboy antics. 

Some things from Google (mainly Geo) roughly over the last year and my reaction: (in no particualr order…)

Good

  • Static Maps API
  • Earth Plugin and API
  • Chrome Browser!
  • Map Icons in Chart API
  • Reverse Geocoding (& BBOX on forward)
  • StreetView
  • High resolution Imagry (including Wales/UK)

Bad

  • No PhotoOverlay or 3D-navigator in Earth Plugin
  • Google Installers and Updaters – a mess
  • Google Maps API Terms of Service. 
  • Google Pages shutting down (sites is NOT a real replacement atm) 
  • No Google Spell Check for Chrome (as no toolbar), and other minor irritations
  • Slow development on Google Maps – particully MyMaps (and MyMaps API)

Indifferent

  • Google Earth 4.3 a disapointment (plus no real upgrades since) 
  • Help Forums – good, but not there yet…
  • GeoWeb Search API – close, but no cigar

… so its not all bad, I guess just getting more worked up about the bad, and don’t really have anything to say about the good.

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Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Google Sea Bed :: Useful? but not pretty!

January 18th, 2009

UPDATE: JULY 2010, petition: Google Earth should make the sea floor rendering optional

Frank, just alerted me to the new rendering Google have released for Google Earth of the Ocean Floor. Strangely I keep wanting to shout FAIL! Sure at the broadest sense – viewing the globe as a whole it looks quite nice, if a little fuzzy, but once start zooming into coastline, the matching is just a mess. The new lighter blue just sort of fades out the old darker blue. Have to say even Frank doesn’t seem convinced…

Admittedly I not really into ocean travel so the probably higher resolution doesn’t really interest me, so that puts it at a disadvantage from my point of view. Hopefully they can vastly improve the edge matching, aka the coastline, then I wont mind.

Ok so it wasn’t perfect before, having a greenish area – but it just looks like algae. But the new doesn’t look natural somehow.

Another issue (oh dear), is the new lighter blue around the UK, is a closer to shade of land. And in the overview map – example below, I can’t even see Wales, and most of England and France etc is pretty indistinct – making the overview map fairly worthless. (disclaimer: I am red/green colour blind)

Overall: E- (sorry)

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Posted in Google Earth, update | 2 Comments »

Four things I don’t like about Google Chrome

January 16th, 2009

Sort of following on from Ten things I don’t like about Google Chrome, and inspired by the comments in Tabbed Browsing in Google Chrome, below are my biggest annoyances with Google Chrome (otherwise a worthy browser), in rough ‘annoyance’ order

  1. No Page title – other than the truncated one in the tab, or a tooltip. Makes using forums a pain – I have a terrible memory, have to think hard what the thread title is in many cases. A quote from a chrome developer(?) pkasting: We think page titles are generally not very useful, which is why we’ve demoted them in our UI so much. The added information doesn’t seem worth the space lost to display a full title somewhere. All I can say is Ugg! I have a bookmarklet that mostly adds it back – have to remember to click it, and ti doesnt work well with Gmail etc. Hopefully extensions, aka greasemonkly clone, will help with this… [On geograph forum its was this lack of contaxt that prompted me to add the page title and current forum just above the post reply box - again to prevent having to scroll to the top ot find it]
  2. Tab ordering. Chrome uses a special system for desiding where to open new tabs. Admittly it works well in many cases, but its still very annoying that its not easily deterministic – so sometimes have to go hunting for that tab just opened. Its not next to the current tab (if opened multiple)0, and its not at the end, its somewhere in the middle of nowhere! I dont think at the end of the tab list is ideal, but its a better comprimise (IMHO of course) than the current system. 
  3. Truncated ‘status bar’.  When hovering over a link it shows a preview of the link – a very useful feature. (the only reason have the status bar on in other browsers. But it shortens the URL in many cases – putting in … . I have a wide enough screen, why not show me the whole thing! (of course still truncate if it wont fit on screen. 
  4. Minimal ‘Page Info’ dialog. It would be so much nicer if the dialog included the url and page title. Particully useful for ‘View frame info’ :) The icing on the cake would the http headers, and sometimes the media tab (from firefox) comes in handy.

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Posted in Off Topic | 2 Comments »

Run (& Develop) Geograph locally!

December 13th, 2008

I’ve prepared a VMware virtual machine, that contains a ready to run instance of Geograph (British Isles). This was primarlly for my own purposes as my current working copy runs on windoz, so didn’t replicate fully the real enviroment. Now I can still run my IDE on windows, but have the code running in a almost totally faithful copy. 

The compressed image is available from:

Geograph Torrents Downloads (346.62 MB)

Requirements to run the image:

  • WMware workstation or WMare player
  • a 7z uncompression tool (apparently the best compression method for VM images)
  • At least 3GB diskspace (the image’s disk uncompressed needs 2GB – but could expand to 10GB)
  • a web-browser (to actully view something) 
  • A smattering of linux know-how (to actully login and view the files – also to try changing things) 
  • To do anything useful, experience with PHP, mySQL and website development in general, is a big bonus

The image’s application database is empty – it contains no photos or other data from Geograph British Isles, other than the bare minimum to get running (but contains the non-copyrighted BI geodata for map plotting etc). If you want a developers dump to try loading some real data please get in touch with the team. 

Hopefully this should be a real quickstart way to get a local working copy running – ready setup with required software, cronjobs etc – ideal for:

  • Just finding out more about how the site works :)
  • Doing real development work – with the aim to contribute back (its ready setup for easy SVN commits) 
  • To customise the code for a new country! (we have plans to make this even easier)

(NB. only torrent download currently available – others probably available on request)

Enjoy!

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Posted in Experimental, Geograph | 1 Comment »

MGRS coordinate entry

December 12th, 2008

Prompted by one of those infernal* posts on a Google Maps group, have finally been inspired to cobble together a MGRS -> Lat/Long conversion. It seems trvial, the UTM->MGRS conversion is quite simple, but there are a few gotchas!, so after much puzzleing over some C code from GeoTrans (and Trial&Error for good measure!), I think** have something working.

Anyway try it out here: 

Coordinate Flyto for Google Earth/Maps

also added today is a tickbox to open the result direct in Google Maps (rather than Google Earth). 

I’ll tidy it up and post the code, which is based on the PHPcoord conversion class, incase others have a use. I’ll also add it to the API – and possibly even back port it into Perl for use on the on site coordinate covertor. 

Finally possibly of interest is the realisation that the MGRS Google Earth Gridlines layer, will actully load directly in Google Maps, so:

MGRS Gridlines in Google Maps

the lines should update a few seconds after dragging/zooming. Ideally will suppress the big blue pins (which are show as numbers in GE) , but not tonight…

 

 

* in the nicest possible sence!

** I tested it by converting utm->mgrs->utm globally on a worldwide 1 degree grid – all check out with absolute precision.

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Posted in Code, Coordinate Converter, Experimental, Google Earth, Google Maps, KML, mgrs, PHP | 9 Comments »

Between a rock and a hard place…

December 8th, 2008

This is going to be a long and rambley piece about licences and the updated updated Terms of Service of the Google Maps API – if either of those don’t interest you turn away now :)

Not that long ago Google updated the Terms of Service on Google Maps API – I guess mainly in responce to issues brought up on the Mail group, and elsewhere. As a result of that edit there where many concerns raised (and more)- and a further edit was made. (note, only linked to some of the blogs etc – follow links to read more) This was over a week ago, but due to non online commitments haven’t really had a time to follow this up. You can read my early reaction here, which has been edited in to Mikes post.

Below is the main section that is still causing concern, quoted in its entirety:

11. Licenses from You to Google.

11.1 Content License. Google claims no ownership over Your Content, and You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Your Content. By submitting, posting or displaying Your Content in the Service, you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute Your Content through the Service and as search results through Google Services. This license is solely for the purpose of enabling Google to operate the Service, to promote the Service (including through public presentations), and to index and serve such content as search results through Google Services. If you are unable or unwilling to provide such a license to Your Content, please see the FAQ for information on configuring your Maps API Implementation to opt out.

11.2 Brand Features License. You grant to Google a nontransferable, nonexclusive license during the Term to use Your Brand Features to advertise that you are using the Service.

11.3 Authority to Grant Licenses. You confirm and warrant to Google that you have all the rights, power and authority necessary to grant the above licenses.

To be honest still unsure how I feel about this section, and finding it very hard to vocalise (well to put to pixels) the concerns. I certain its not compatible with a number of situations where the Maps would otherwise be ideal, but that I guess is real life – just need to move on an find something that is more suitable. But its still gauling to have invested so much in Google Maps API to have it all disappear in puff of legal smoke, I guess its now going to be“Once Burnt, Twice Shy” as they say.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted in API, Google Maps, KML, update, Web Services | 2 Comments »

Use Google Maps API to display data? Your data has been POWNED

November 13th, 2008

If you use Google Maps API to display data on our website, then beware; new Terms of Service have been introduced. And it doesn’t look good…

Basically its laid out pretty clearly (see section 11.1) that if you use the API to display *your* data, then you grant Google a irrevocable licence to do as it sees fit with your data.

Sure it says “You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Your Content. ” – first, to soften the blow, but then goes on to say “[to] publicly perform, publicly display and distribute Your Content… ” (click the above link to see the full text) – I dont see how that is any different to saying they can do what they like with your data.

It gets worse if you have “business listings data”, as 11.1(b) says: “For example, if you create a store locator application, Google may use the business listings information from the store locator to improve the Google Services such as Google Maps and local search.”
- give your data away free to Google why don’t you!

then as 11.3 says “Authority to Grant Licenses. You confirm and warrant to Google that you have all the rights, power and authority necessary to grant the above licenses.” – in many cases I* don’t think I can!

So does that mean if I can’t grant the licence demanded, I can’t use the Maps API? It seems so to me, so its with a heavy heart have had to disable some API based maps and Mashups. At least in the short term.

* as the one agreeing to the Maps API Terms Of Service.

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Posted in API, Google Maps | 18 Comments »

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