GDD08: What's New in Geo Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

After lunch, and I decided to skip the code labs and head for What's new in Geo with Jean-Laurent Wotton and Russell Middleton. Which means, oddly enough, I'm back in Donkey Kong...


Jean-Laurent Wotton and Russell Middleton
Russell kicked the session off with a Google Maps introduction to get everyone up to speed with the API. Handing over to Jean-Laurent we're being shown how to use the Maps geocoding service.

Moving on from the introductory Maps material we're talking about cool new features. First up, is the AJAX Search API, which has actually been around for a while...

Next up is Static Maps API, which lets you embed a Google Maps image on your webpage without requiring JavaScript or any dynamic page loading, and last week started serving satellite imagery as well as the normal map type. Interestingly there is also a Static Map Wizard to allow you to build a (moderately) sophisticated map without any knowledge of coding.

Now Russell is talking about the Flash API, which lets you write the code in ActionScript 3, compile it against the Google interface library and output a SWF containing the Map. I'm not a Flash guy, no pun intended, but it looks fairly solid.


Jean-Laurent and the Google Earth API
Back to Jean-Laurent and the Google Earth API which was introduced a few months ago. Although of course, as a Mac user, I still can't get at the Earth API, and there doesn't seem to be any news on the arrival of Linux and Mac versions of the plug-in as yet. Cool demo though...

Next is Google's Street View Service and how to display these both in and outside the Maps interface. Also pretty cool, although it's not yet possible to overlay anything on top of the panorama as yet.

Moving on, the final new feature is location detection. Until recently the user had to centre/zoom in their location themselves, the solution is automatic detect the user's location using the Maps AJAX API. The Maps API now automatically tries to geocode the user's IP address, and if successful it will make this location available to the application. If successful you can also capture the city, country, country code and region.

Next up is image overlays, and how the Google Maps interface can be used to navigate custom images by defining a custom overlay.

Finally, we're moving on to KML and network links, where as it happens, I'm on fairly solid ground so to speak...

...and we're done.

Update: Except we're not. Jean-Laurent and Russell have handed over to Angela Rele from the Met Office about using Google Earth to show the global impacts of climate change and the Google Outreach project.

GDD08: What's New in Gears Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

After the break I'm back in Donkey Kong and listening to What's new in Gears with Aaron Boodman.


Aaron Boodman talking about Gears
The point of Gears is to add functionality to web applications, but Gears isn't just about "offline", what Google is trying to do is expose the capabilities of the local machine, whether that's your desktop of your mobile phone, to your web applications.

Every Google Chrome installation has Gears pre-installed, but Gears now supports IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari as well as Chrome. Although the Safari port was only launched yesterday. However the latest Android build also comes with a Gears stub, not full support, but it is coming soon.

We're spending some time talking about Gears' Desktop API and shortcut icons, and the File System API. The file system allows multi-file selection, fitering my extension or mime-type, native OS look-and-feel and makes sure the user has full control...

Obviously what you want to be able to do when you select a file, you want to do something with the contents of the file, and web applications can't. Which is what the Blob is for, it's a generic interchange format.

Next up is the Resumable Upload API which sits onto of the Blob API, which is apparently now live on YouTube. You can in theory parallelize the upload, but most browsers have a fairly low connection limit per-domain, so you can parallelize uploads up to that limit.

I'm going to use Chrome, because they told us to use Chrome as much as possible. But it does work on the other browsers...

Perhaps one of the coolest of the new APIs is the GeoLocation API, which can make use of on-board GPS, cell-phone tower and Wi-Fi access point triangulation. But developers can implement plug-ins to provide more methods of location. It should degrade cleanly, the API will provide the best guess of the user's location to your code.

What's next for Gears? More of the same, continue to unlock the capabilities of the host system.

...we're out of slides, and the floor is open for questions.

is there any plans to allow applications to share data between domains? This is a problem Google has, and initially they thought about sharing databases together, but that seems like a recipie for disaster. What Gears has is Cross-origin Workers, a secure solution to the cross-origin restriction policy of the browser.

...and we're breaking for lunch. Still not sure whether I'll end up in a code lab or the main tracks for the rest of the afternoon.