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Do you ever find yourself using our Static Maps API, wishing you could cover your maps with markers of all sorts of colors, sizes, and letters, or that you could draw lines all over the map? Well, today is your lucky day. Check out these new features in the Static Maps API (and the kind of output you can get from it!) below:

• More marker options: You can now specify 4 different sizes (from normal to tiny), and 8 different colors (and for half of the sizes, you can specify a letter as well).
• Paths: You can specify a path of up to 50 points, along with color, weight, and alpha.
• Image formats: You can specify PNG, JPG, or GIF output.
• Transliterated tiles: You can explicitly specify a language, if you'd like transliterated tiles (for Greece or Japan, for example).

Feel free to play around with the options in the updated Static Map Wizard or read through the documentation. As usual, please post questions or comments in the forum. We'd love to see how developers are using this API and its newest features.

Today, we're happy to introduce rooftop geocoding in the Google Maps API. This new service delivers pinpoint results for more than 50 million US addresses. The accuracy gains are impressive — and useful. Now, users can distinguish between locations on one side of the street versus the other and can identify specific addresses even in densely built environments.

Check it out for yourself below, starting with the geocode for the Google "house":

There's four big Geo events in the San Francisco Bay Area this month, and Mano and I will be at all of them. Here's the details:

Where2.0: May 12-14th

Sharing Your Content on the Google Maps API

In this session, you'll roll up your sleeves and learn about publishing and sharing using the Maps API. Then we’ll hear from Google partners about what constitutes “great” content and how they expose it.

Searching the Geoweb: Exposing Your Geo Data to Search Engines

Have you been wondering how to drive traffic to that cool maps mashup you created recently? We’ll show you how to get your maps mashup crawled and indexed, and how best to optimize your content for user discovery via search using KML.

WhereCamp: May 17-18th

No sessions planned! This is an unconference - that means the participants do the session planning on the spot. So if there's a Maps API or KML topic you want to talk about, come on by and propose it! (And stay for the slumber party, there'll be lots of hacking and coffee). And, it'll be at the Googleplex! And it's free!

Web 2.0 Mapping and Social Networks Group: May 20th

Communities + Google Maps: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

Pamela Fox will talk about the various ways of using Google Maps & the Maps API to create user-contributed maps, covering the spectrum from no-coding solutions to full custom databases and code, and showing examples of sites successfully using each technique.

Google I/O: May 28-29th

There's lots of Geo sessions at Google I/O, here's just 3:

Harnessing StreetView, Static Maps, and other New Additions to the Google Maps API:

Ben Appleton will review some of the recent additions to the Maps API including how to use Static Maps for fast page loads and printable maps, and how to incorporate Street View imagery in your app.

Hosting Your Geo Data, an Overview of Design Options:

Mano Marks will discuss the various options for hosting your Geo data, including Google App Engine, and explain how to choose the right data model for your project.

The World's Information in Context:

Michael T. Jones will discuss new product directions and key trends of importance to geo developers.

Be sure to visit the Google I/O website to see the complete list of sessions and to register. For those coming from out of town, we've arranged discounted room rates at nearby hotels. Read the details on the website to take advantage of the discount, but move fast because the hotel discount ends May 13th.

We're looking forward to seeing you at some of these events soon.

When we launched the map editing tools in Google Maps, the reaction of developers was "This is cool, but how can I use it on my own site?" As someone who was originally drawn to Google in part because of the Maps API and the great developer community around it, I committed to making the My Maps tools useful for developers on their own sites.

Today, I'm pleased to announce that our user interface functionality for editable polylines and polygons is now part of the Maps API.

Say, for example, that you have a GPolygon you want users to be able to edit. Simply call GPolygon.enableEditing() and the poly will have draggable edit control vertices when the user mouses over it. To later make it non-editable, call GPolygon.disableEditing().

We've also exposed additional events for GPolygon and GPolyline so that you can easily mimic the MyMaps behavior (in mashups or Mapplets) by calling enableEditing on "mouseover" and disableEditing on "mouseout". To find out when the user makes an edit, listen for the "lineupdated" event. And if you want users to be able to draw a new GPolyline completely from scratch, just use enableDrawing as shown below:

var polyline = new GPolyline([]);
map.addOverlay(polyline);
polyline.enableDrawing();

Every click on the map will add a new vertex to the polyline until the user double-clicks or clicks again on the last vertex. You can also call enableDrawing to lets users append vertices to either end of an existing polyline. And just because everyone likes pretty colors, we exposed methods to let you change the style of a polyline or polygon: setStrokeStyle and setFillStyle. Have fun, and let us know what you think in the forum.

Last week during the geo madness of Where2.0 and WhereCamp, we announced two enhancements in geo search to make it both easier for developers to get their data into our geo search index and easier for developers to get data back out of the index:

• Geo Sitemaps: Sitemaps are a protocol that bots use to index content from websites. Last year, we announced the ability to include KML/GeoRSS files in regular sitemaps just like a normal web resource. This year, we announce a special extension for sitemaps that adds geo-specific tags and makes it easier for us to index. To get your geo content indexed as fast as possible, just submit the sitemap to Google Webmaster Central. For more information on creating a KML file to include in a sitemap, read this article in the KML documentation. An example geo sitemap listing a KML and a GeoRSS file is shown below:

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
        xmlns:geo="http://www.google.com/geo/schemas/sitemap/1.0">
<url>
   <loc>http://www.example.com/download?format=kml</loc>
   <geo:geo>
       <geo:format>kml</geo:format>
   </geo:geo>
</url>
<url>
   <loc>http://www.example.com/download?format=georss</loc>
   <geo:geo>
       <geo:format>georss</geo:format>
   </geo:geo>
</url>
</urlset>

• Geo search in the API: The Local Search API has traditionally been used to return business listings and address geocodes. As of last week, it can now be used to retrieve any of the content we have in our geo index. There are a couple different ways to do this, depending on how you use the API. If you're using the LocalSearchControl, here's some sample code (and live example) that will return blended results:

var options = {
  listingTypes : GlocalSearch.TYPE_BLENDED_RESULTS
}
map.addControl(new google.maps.LocalSearch(options));

If you're using the Local Search API from Javascript, here's some sample code to return only results from indexed geo files:

var ls = new GlocalSearch();
ls.setRestriction(GSearch.RESTRICT_TYPE, GlocalSearch.TYPE_KMLONLY_RESULTS);

And finally, if you're using the Local Search API from somewhere other than Javascript - for example, with our new nifty Maps API for Flash - here's some sample AS3 code (and live example) to return only results from indexed geo files PLUS add a site restrict operator to limit it to results from platial.com:

service.url = 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/local';
service.request.q = "site: platial.com" + " " +  address.text;
service.request.mrt = "kmlonly";
service.addEventListener(ResultEvent.RESULT, onServerResponse);
service.send();

There are (atleast) two really cool consequences of this news: 1) you'll be able to enable users of your mashups to instantly find international results where previously none existed, and to be able to find results for non-standard searches (e.g. "dog parks"), and 2) by indexing your content, waiting a few weeks, and then using the local search with a "site:yourdomain.com" appended to the query, you get to leverage the power of google search on your own content with barely any code of your own.

So what are you waiting for? Give us your geo sitemap, use our API calls, and let us know what you think in the Maps API, KML, or AJAX API forums.