Archive for April, 2008

Firefox 3 users, rejoice! Today I’m pleased to announce a beta release of an enhanced version of our Firefox Add-on for del.icio.us that now has full Firefox 3 support while retaining Firefox 2 compatibility. While it is largely similar to the release version of our Firefox Add-on, there are a few nifty new features:

• Jump to Tag feature (press ctrl-shift-y) allows you to quickly access tags and
  bookmarks using the keyboard
• New layout for saving bookmarks
• Preferences now in a separate dialog under Tools (which also can be
  invoked via the prefs button on the FF Add-ons pane)
• Status bar indicators for network activity, new links for you, and the del.icio.us website
• Classic mode for users who just want simple buttons without the overhead of sync

Like any beta release this Firefox Add-on is meant to provide you with a preview of upcoming features. Some of the features and interface choices, like Jump To Tag, are experimental and may change before we officially launch and we’re eager to hear your feedback on the changes, especially if you think we can do certain things better. If you have issues or comments, please let us know in the delicious-firefox-extension Yahoo! Group.

If you’re not already familiar with the extension, take a look at our Quick Tour which explains the basics. It hasn’t been updated to reflect all the new features but is a great way to get started.

Thanks for helping us test- we’ve built and upgraded these Add-ons based on lots of user feedback and we hope you enjoy trying them out.

Nick Nguyen
Senior Product Manager, del.icio.us

Posted by Pamela Fox, Maps API Team

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.

The last month has been really hectic. I moved my home office to Bath in the west of England - the Internet connection is now back up after a long delay and things are kind of getting back to normal - phew! Although the move has been stressful my office now looks over beautiful Bath and I'm really happy to be living there.

Right now I'm in Boston for the Infonortics Search Engine Meeting - I'm speaking after lunch and provided jetlag doesn't strike I'm hoping to join some of the other delegates at a local jazz club later tonight. Time to relax a little before pushing Trexy further into the cloud.

This paper discusses the management, security, performance and extensibility improvements when Windows Server 2008 is deployed to host and manage applications and services that run on the server and/or over the Web. Check it out on this TechNet link ...(read more)

Posted by Steve Gerding, Software Engineer

Today, by popular demand, we are making TV view the default search result view for Google Video. If you haven't seen it yet, TV view is a new interface that lets you browse search results, watch videos, and check out related videos -- all on the same page. Here's what it looks like:


Videos that we are able to embed will play directly in the TV view player when you click on them. These include almost all Google- and YouTube-hosted videos, as well as videos from many other sites such as metacafe.com, crackle.com, and hundreds of others. Videos that cannot be embedded will display a thumbnail or filmstrip that links to the page where the video can be played. If you're a webmaster and would like your videos to be embeddable in TV view, check out our Video Sitemaps Help Center.

In addition to playing the video, clicking on a search result will reload the list of related videos on the right hand side of the page. Next time you're watching a video, try flipping through the related videos; you might find something even better that what you originally searched for! Just like search results, most related videos can be played directly in the TV view player.

We hope you enjoy this new search experience. Of course, if you prefer either list or grid view to TV view, you can switch your view preference at any time by clicking on one of the view icons at the top of the page:

Posted by Mano Marks, Google Geo APIs Team

Google Developer Days 2008, a set of one-day developer events, are back and will take place in locations around the world. We've designed these events for developers with strong coding backgrounds, so that we can discuss our APIs, developer tools and applications.

We'll host Google Developer Days in these locations:

• Yokohama, Japan (June 10)
• Beijing, China (June 12)
• Taipei, Taiwan (June 14)
• Sydney, Australia (June 18)
• Mexico City, Mexico (June 23)
• Sao Paulo, Brazil (June 27)
• London, UK (Sept 16)
• Paris, France (Sept 18)
• Munich, Germany (Sept 23)
• Madrid, Spain (Sept 25)
• Milan, Italy (Oct 21)
• Prague, Czech (Oct 23)
• Moscow, Russia (Oct 28)

If you're based in the US, we encourage you to come to Google I/O, on May 28-29 in San Francisco.

At Google Developer Day, our Maps and KML engineers will share their inside knowledge on our developer tools and APIs, including the Google Maps API and KML. In many locations we'll do deep dives into code and conduct hands-on codelabs. If you come to Yokohama and Mexico City, say hi to me and Pamela Fox.

We've posted detailed information for our early dates and will be adding more information for other locations soon. If you're a developer, we encourage you to sign-up for a Google Developer Day at a nearby location. I hope to see you there.

Posted by Pamela Fox, Maps API Team

Several weeks ago, we announced the official release of Street View in the Maps API and invited developers to post examples of their Street View mashups. We crossed our fingers and hoped that we'd made the classes flexible and functional enough for developers to work with, and soon enough the examples started flowing in.

Here are some of my favorites:

	DualMaps: For a given location, displays the Street View, Birds Eye View, and Google aerial map view simultaneously and lets you embed or share the result
	Povo: A local reviews site specially for Boston. Displays street view in a lightbox for each location, and has made a Street View tour especially for the recent Boston Marathon.
	StreetView Adventure Game: In the spirit of the classic interactive fiction games like Zork, this demo lets you play a short game that begins with chasing a guy trying to climb out a window in San Francisco.

Also check out VegasVision, Ong Map V2 (Alpha), VPike, FlyRig, Street View Gadget, LotView, Street View SF Tour, RealBird, Glotter and a Street View Tour Gadget. And if you loved Trulia's implementation (announced on Google LatLong last week), check out this demo that shows how to angle a street view panorama towards the side of the street that a building is on. (It involves math, but don't worry, we've done it for you.)

Thanks to all you developers for sharing your work with us, and as always, please post your examples or questions in the forum.

Posted by Greg Billock, Software Engineer

As part of our mission, we on the Google Video team want you to be able to search, browse and discover videos from across the web. More than a year ago, we described our renewed focus on organizing all the web's video. Today, in addition to expanding Google Video's search capabilities, we have a number of new browse- and search-related features we're excited to share.

Now you can choose any of three ways to view your video search-results: a traditional list view, a grid view and, for those of you who like to maximize your video-watching efficiency, a TV view, where you can watch an embedded video while continuing to view your search results next to the video for a more seamless browse and search experience.

Try them out by clicking on the gray icon boxes:



You may have also noticed that we've given the Google Video homepage a bit of a facelift. We wanted to make it as easy as possible for you to find and access the web's most compelling videos, and just as before, you can see what videos people are viewing, sharing, and blogging about -- but now, with the new TV view, you can also watch many of the top videos directly on the homepage.

Introduction – Modern .NET Development It took me a while to realize it, but Microsoft .NET application development has significantly evolved in the past year and a half. This is not your dad’s .NET . The following releases have added many considerable...(read more)

Posted by Pamela Fox, Maps API Team

Two months ago, we announced the start of the Google Geo Developer series on this blog. The point of the series was to bring together local geo developers for intimate talks/discussions around Maps/KML topics, and then let all developers watch the events on YouTube. It was a bit of an experiment - would we find enough topics for talks every week? Would anyone watch the videos? Well, I'm happy to say it was a successful experiment. Besides having 6 great talks and more than 20,000 YouTube video views, we also met a bunch of local developers working on geo projects (thanks for always showing up, you guys), and even met some folks from far away through the mailing list. Hopefully we'll get to hold another of these series in the falls, so subscribe to the mailing list if you want to find out about future events.

Here's a roundup of the talks that went down, with links to videos. Click "More info" on the YouTube description and you'll often find a link to slides/materials.

• Quick & Dirty KML Creation: With Mano Marks, Pamela Fox, and Christiaan Adams
  A demonstration of creating KML visually in Google Earth & Google Maps, and using Spreadsheet Mapper 2.0
• Creating Custom Maps: With John Coryat
  A comparison of various ways of overlaying data in the Maps API and an in-depth explanation of creating tile layers and custom map types
• GigaPan In-Depth: With Randy Sargent & Ted Morse
  A demo of the GigaPan panorama-browsing website and KML files, plus a technical explanation of PhotoOverlay
• Dynamic KML: With Mano Marks & Brian Hamlin
  An exploration of using dynamic queries from KML, using the NetworkLink, httpQuery, and viewFormat elements, plus a demo of a PostGIS-generated NetworkLink
• Mars, Moon, and Sky Map Types: With Noel Gorelick
  A talk introducing the non-Earth Maps API map types, plus cool demos of other types of projections used with planetary imagery
• Mapping the Votes: With Michael Geary
  A whirlwind tour of what it took to create the Elections 2008 Map/Mapplet/Gadget, including SHPfile conversion, Javascript optimization, centroid calculations, Twitter updates collection, Mapplet API tricks, and more.
• Google API Talks - Android, KML, Google Maps, Gadgets
  A series of 5-minute talks by various developers and Googlers given before Geary's presentation, including an intro to Gadgets/Mapplets.