Maplify.com

By Roman Nurik from the Google team.  

This is the final geo session for Google I/O 2009.  Links for Roman’s presentation can be found HERE. 

As Roman pointed out, this marks the 1 year anniversary of the Google Earth API.  New features over the last year include:

• Mac Support
• KML Tour Playback
• Underwater Terrain
• Mars mode
• Enterprise server connectivity
• Over 80 samples in the demo gallery

Roman introduced ‘My Earth’ a mashup of the new Google MyMaps Data API and the Google Earth API.

To support the app, he’s released new Earth API open source libraries:

1. geojs which provides common geo math and geometries
2. earth-api-utility-library (GEarthExtensions)

• creates KML objects via ‘JSONic’ methods
• new methods for feature by id, dom walk, and ‘clear’ features
• Animations/effects framework
• 1-line draggable placemarks and line strings
• Screen overlay ‘Buttons’ including a control set like MyMaps geometry editing
• Apache 2.0 License

Other Recent Developments G_SATELLITE_3D_MAP has been upgraded significantly:

• all KML features supported in ggeoXML will now transer to the Earth mode
• it appears that javascript based updates to ggeoXML now propagate to the Earth mode
• 3D objects within KML called by ggeoXML will now show in Earth mode even though don’t in the 2D modes
• switches to and from the Earth mode now include nicer animations in tilt and rotation

All in all a great session with some fun new tools!

Google has released a new version of the Google Earth API and Plugin today.  Based on the release notes, there are a lot of goodies for users and developers.  

The upgrade extends recent Google Earth 5.0 client features into the Plugin including Tour Playback and Ocean Content as mentioned by Frank Taylor at Google Earth Blog.  

Basic timeline support is also available - an oft requested feature since the release of the plugin last May (it’s really been almost a year!).  Play the DestinSharks.com Death Valley Driving Tour with the new Plugin - this was one of the 1st KML files to use the original timeline support in Google Earth 4.  If you don’t see the timeline, you’ll need to uninstall the GE Plugin and reinstall it to get the latest version. 

Further improving custom event handling, Google has added 3 new event handler routines for capturing user interaction with the map via the GEView object: viewchangebegin, viewchange, and viewchangeend.  This way you don’t need to use a custom function like the one we demonstrated previously.  

New methods for getting the current view bounds and for determining the streaming status for imagery and terrain are also available.  

Google Earth Enterprise customers get the ability to configure Plugin instances to use their custom Google Earth servers - providing Enterprise customers the option to use the GE Client, GE Plugin, and Google Maps as ways to disseminate custom datasets.  Google has updated the API documentation and posted Release Notes for the upgrades.