Weekly Google Code Roundup for June 25-29th

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

It has been a great week. From the new Google Gadget Ventures, to the new ability to click and drag locations on Google Maps, and beyond with some fantastic talks that were given on campus.

In API and developer-product news...

Do you like developing gadgets? Have you started to make a business around the ones you have developed? We want to help, and we announced the
Google Gadget Ventures program which allows you to apply for grants, and even seed investments.

The Google Mashup Gallery is a mashup itself, that allows you to add your mashup to the mix. Now, everyone will be able to find your Britney vs. Christina mashup!

AppleScripting Google Desktop means that you can tell the Google Desktop application to do things for you via script. Boss around the system from your own applications and scripts.

The new Google Earth Outreach program has some tutorials such as showing you how to create KML from a spreadsheet.

Around Google

Instead of statically working with points on Google Maps. Now you can click and drag points around, which results in your driving directions redrawing on the fly. This can be addicting.

Docs and Spreadsheets just got easier with a new look and feel, and a new folder view. Don't worry though, it is still tags behind the scenes.

Google Desktop is now available for Linux: Since some Linux users are program developers, Google Desktop was designed with the ability to search source code and information contained in .pdf, .ps, .man and .info documents. It also features the Quick Search Box ,which you can call up by pressing the Ctrl key twice. Type a few letters or words into the search box and your top results pop up instantly.

Put your photos on a map, and Picasa on your phone.

Featured Projects

Facebook Gadget Receive your latest notifications on Facebook, check out your friends' latest updates, view photos, and even launch searches all from your Google Homepage.

Fill That Hole has a new Pothole Mapplet that keeps you in the know as you choose your biking routes.

Google Tech Talks

Simon Willison gave a talk on the the implications of OpenID and placed his slides online for your pleasure.

Raph Levien came to talk to us about his lessons from Advogato, the community blog for free software developers.

Cameron Purdy discussed getting Coherence discussing data grids and what they can do for you.

Philippe Mougin, the project lead of FScript - a scripting solution for Mac OS X / Cocoa, discussed the project which "is much more than just a scripting language, like smalltalk it provides a set of high level exploration, browsing and development tools which let you explore Objective C libraries as easily as FScript ones."

View more tech talks.

Podcasts

Summer of Coders at Google: Desmond Elliott

Desmond Elliott visited a few weeks ago and I got to catch up with him about his work on the Camino project for SoC 2006 and his plans for working with OpenMRS this year. Desmond also has the usual sage advice for would-be Summer of Code students and some thoughts on our first SoC podcast with Angie Byron from the Drupal project.

It's a click & drag situation

Posted by Ryan Sturgell and Barry Brumitt, Software Engineers, Google Maps

Can you imagine going back to clicking arrows and waiting for the screen to refresh just to move the map left/right/up/down? It'd be as big a bummer as going back to 8-track tapes. Today, we're taking another big step forward with driving directions in Google Maps: now you can click & drag to change destinations along your route.

Let's imagine you want to help your friend Terry, who's visiting Seattle this week, by giving her directions to your favorite beach volleyball spot on the waterfront in Kirkland, Washington.

Step 1. Terry is staying somewhere in downtown Seattle, so you zoom into that location and add this destination by right-clicking on somewhere in that general vicinity.

Step 2. To set the End Destination, you repeat the same process, zooming in and right-clicking on the park. But if you've selected the wrong park by mistake, you can now change this destination just by clicking & dragging the marker from the wrong park to the correct one. And while you're dragging, you can watch the route change in real time (including a running ticker of the current street name plus an updated distance and time of the route).



Voila! You're done. If you click "Link to this Page," you can email the link to Terry. But wait! She is planning to drive over on a weekday morning during rush hour, and you'd like to adjust the route so that she misses 520 bridge traffic. So...

Step 3. To ensure the directions take the I-90 Bridge across Lake Washington, you can click on the route itself from where it goes across the 520 bridge and drag it to the I-90 bridge, again watching the route update while you drag.



So there you have it. Once you've used click & drag for creating and modifying routes, we think you'll find that you simply can't fathom how you managed without it. I mean, where are your 8-tracks?

Google Gadget Ventures

By Tom Stocky, Google Developer Programs

Good news for Google Gadget developers. We've just launched Google Gadget Ventures, a new pilot program for distributing grants and seed investments to gadget developers and gadget-related businesses. We're excited about the opportunity this will give developers to build even richer, more useful gadgets and get recognized for doing it.

The program will provide two kinds of funding. First, we'll invite promising gadget developers (individuals or businesses) to apply for $5,000 grants to fund further development. These are not loans or equity investments; they're simply grants for gadgets that already have a thriving user base and we think have potential for even more improvement. To be considered for a grant, your gadget needs to have more than 250,000 pageviews per week, and you need to provide a one-page proposal on how you'd like to improve your gadget. This is a no-strings-attached grant; we won't ask for repayment of any kind. We simply ask that you work on your project in good faith.

Secondly, the program will make $100,000 seed investments in companies that either start as a Google Gadget or have a large Google Gadget component. In order to be eligible for a seed investment, you must have received a $5,000 grant, and you must propose a plan for making your gadget financially sustainable.

If you're interested in creating your own Google Gadget, we have several tools that can help. The Google Mashup Editor has an option for instantly deploying your web app as a gadget. For Java programmers, Google Web Toolkit provides another good way to write a gadget or a full-featured AJAX app with a gadget component. The Google Data APIs and AJAX Feed API can help power your gadget with rich data sources. You can even add offline functionality using Google Gears.

We hope you find these tools useful for creating gadgets, and we're eager to hear what you think in the Google Gadgets discussion group.

Google Earth Outreach

Posted by Rebecca Moore, Manager, Google Earth Outreach

You may have heard that we've launched an exciting new program for non-profit organizations called Google Earth Outreach.

We hope you'll read more about the genesis of the program, watch a video of yesterday's launch event, and have a look at the Google Earth Outreach website, where you'll find tutorials on how to create a great KML, case studies written by organizations who are already using Google Earth, and a showcase featuring dozens of public-benefit KMLs. And then we hope you'll get started on your own!

We've also posted some video on YouTube from our Google Earth Outreach event on Tuesday. Take a look:

Weekly Google Code Roundup for June 18-22th

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

It has been a busy week as usual, especially for those interested in the world of Geo.

In API and developer-product news...

Base diving with Google Gears covers an application that we built that searches Google Base and saves the information with Google Gears allowing for off-line use.

The Safe Browsing API was released, which allows your application to use the API to download an encrypted table for local, client-side lookups of URLs that you would like to check. Now you can stop phishers and malware abusers.

Guicing Up Your Testing is the first article in a series on Google Guice by our own Dick Wall.

The Google AJAX Feed API's Slide Show Control is now available as a Google Gadget.

The mapping world was busy as always:

• Add Traffic to Your Mashup (Button + Legend, too)!
• Three new KML resources up
• Set Country/Viewport Restrictions in your GClientGeocoder for More Tailored Results

Around Google

T.V. Raman has discussed his experience using the new open source OCR that we are working on, comparing it to commercial alternatives that he uses.

Put your business on Google Maps with the Local Business Center which has launched a new look.

The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit took place at Google last week. For more information read the wrapup article.

Google Tech Talks

Semantic Web: The Semantic Web is a field aiming a the creation, deployment, and interoperation of machine readable data on the Internet. In the talk we present some projects in DERI on Semantic Web technologies - notably Semantic Interlinking of Online Community sites, Social Semantic Collaborative Filtering, and ActiveRDF, a library for Browsing, programming and navigating Semantic Web data.

View more tech talks.

Podcasts

In Google Developer Podcast Episode Four we had the chance to interview Mark Limber on Google SketchUp, and how developers can use the Ruby, C++, and other APIs.

The OpenMRS Project: You'll get a chance to learn from Paul about the history of OpenMRS, life as a brand new organization in Summer of Code, and the social change uses of open source in developing nations.

Google Developer Podcast Episode Four: Mark Limber on Google SketchUp

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

Using iTunes?

We have published the fourth episode of the Google Developer Podcast, which features an interview on Google SketchUp and how developers can interact with that world.

Interview with Mark Limber on Google SketchUp

What will you learn from this interview?

• Who SketchUp is aimed at, and what it contains
• Creative out-of-the-box uses of SketchUp by fellow developers
• How to do a Hello World model (your house) and put it on Google Earth
• How to find and share your models in the 3D Warehouse
• Various ways in which you can use SketchUp if you are a games developer
• The various SketchUp APIs and how you can extend SketchUp with Ruby, including fun examples out there (dropping trees, manipulating cameras, animation, and much more)
• How to attach and manipulate metadata to the artifacts in SketchUp
• How you can use a web dialog within SketchUp
• Working with materials and textures within your models
• How to use the C++ SDK to use SketchUp from within your own application.

To learn more about SketchUp, visit the forum, and request an SDK.

News

In our news segment we covered:

The Google Gears community response has been great to see. This article discusses several applications and libraries that already work with Gears.

Google Mashup Editor: How to use multiple pages in your mashup

Blogger in Draft has been released for early adopters. This allows you to play with the upcoming Blogger features before they are announced in full. The first feature is video upload, and more are coming.

Tying into the SketchUp interview we discussed the new ability to use animated models in Google Earth.

You can download the episode directly, or subscribe to the show (click here for iTunes one-click subscribe).

Put your business on Google Maps

Posted by Hubert Pan, Product Manager

As part of our quest to build the best local search experience possible, Google's Local Business Center is where business owners can go to add or edit their business listing on Google Maps by providing their address, contact information, hours of operation, and even storefront or product photos.

This free process is now even faster and easier to use. Users in international locales can now receive verification via a phone call or SMS rather than waiting for a postcard in the mail. With our new verification options, it only takes 10 minutes to create or edit, and then verify your listing. We do the rest -- your business will appear on Google Maps within a few weeks.

The center also has a great new look, and it's easy come back multiple times to make changes to your listing:

So, while you are busy writing reviews about your favorite restaurant, barber shop, or any other business, be sure to share the opportunities on Google's Local Business Center with the business owners to help them reach more customers through Google Maps.

The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit @ Google

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Last week, Google hosted the inaugural Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. More than 200 developers and community leaders converged for three days of talks and working group meetings, giving birth to many new synergies within the community. Of particular interest was an initiative formed to improve power management functionality in Linux. If you're interested in learning more about the results of the summit and the Linux Foundation's ongoing activities, you can check out the Linux Foundation's Summit wrap-up or the Foundation's Summit press release.

We'd like to thank all of our guests for attending the summit. It was our pleasure and privilege to help make the summit a success.

More than the sum of its parts

Posted by Steve Lee, Product Manager, Google Maps for mobile

Some experiences are more than the sum of their parts. Here at Google, we recognize that to develop the best user experiences, we can't work alone. We'd like to applaud the inclusion of RIM's Blackberry 8800 and Samsung's Blackjack in PC World's list of the 100 Best Products of 2007. These two devices raise the bar of what is possible in the mobile world, and enable the GPS capabilities needed to fully experience another of PC World's top 100, Google Maps for mobile .

The Maps for mobile team is honored to share this PC World recognition with innovative mobile device manufacturers. We are more excited than ever to continue developing tools to make the mobile device a useful and, some might say, "religious" experience when you're on the go.

Base diving with Google Gears

By Dion Almaer and Pamela Fox, Google Developer Programs

Pamela and I have been enjoying some time building applications with the ever growing set of Google APIs.

As we build these applications we are capturing some of the decisions you may face in building your own, in a series of articles called Building Better Ajax Applications with Google APIs.

The first article, and application, is a Google Base reader, powered by Google Gears, to enable offline use.

The application had us delving into:

• The various components of Google Gears
• How to use the SQLite local database and helpful wrappers around common patterns
• How to capture web resources to make them available to offline use and the issues that you need to be aware of
• How to use the Google Base Data API, specifically getting JSON output into our application
• How to debug your offline Ajax application.

Please take a peek at the application, type in some search queries, and then read the how-to article.

Add your reviews to businesses on Google Maps

Posted by Jonathan Goldman, Software Engineer, Google Maps

The Cheeseboard Pizza Collective in Berkeley is one of my favorite places on the planet. My friends and co-workers will tell you, I can't really shut up about the place. But now, rather than continue to impose my unsolicited opinion about this little gem on those around me, I can finally be more constructive by articulating my thoughts and sharing them with the world. That's right, Google Maps now offers user ratings and reviews of local businesses.

Google Maps has offered a collection of reviews assembled from some of the finest sources on the web for some time, but now we're augmenting those with reviews from an even better source: you -- and, we hope, millions of other opinionated Google users.

Search for your favorite places and click on the "More Info" link. From there, click on "Write a Review" to start giving your two cents.

Don't forget that Google Maps indexes a tremendous variety of businesses, and in a number of countries. Tell the world all about your favorite (or least favorite) doctors and dentists, hotels, bakeries, hardware stores, salons, pet spas, auto mechanics, plumbers, and more. Or perhaps even your favorite restaurant in Tokyo. Give it a try to make your opinions known and discover new favorites.

Trading a bow and arrow for a laptop

Posted by Rebecca Moore, Google Earth team

Recently, several of us on the Google Earth team had the great honor to meet with Chief Almir, leader of the Surui Indian tribe in the Brazilian Amazon. Chief Almir had travelled for many hours and thousands of miles to our Google headquarters in Mountain View, in order to propose an unusual partnership. He had come to ask for our help in protecting the rainforest lands as well as the culture and lives of his people.

The Amazon rainforest and its indigenous peoples are disappearing rapidly. This has serious consequences locally and globally, both for our environment and for the cultural diversity of our planet. If you look at the Surui land today in Google Earth (search on "Ministro Andreazza, Brazil" and then head due east), you'll see that their "island" of healthy, green, primary rainforest is surrounded almost completely by clear-cut, barren land. The stark contrast at their boundary is dramatic, and begins to convey what is at stake.



During his visit, Chief Almir proposed that, in collaboration with their partner, the Amazon Conservation Team, we work together to annotate Google Earth with informative markers and photographs that show the Surui villages, hunting grounds, sacred sites, and cultural sites as well as areas where they've found illegal mining and logging incursions onto their land. By doing so, he hopes to raise global awareness of the Surui people's struggle to preserve their land and culture, by reaching the more than 200 million Google Earth users around the world.

In the early 1980's, Almir's father, Chief Marimo, entered into tribal legend by single-handedly stopping a logging truck full of men with machine guns and revolvers, using only his bow and arrow. His son, Chief Almir, told us that he had realized that the time had now come "to put down the bow and arrow, and pick up the laptop."

We're excited to help Chief Almir on this project. It will take time, but when completed, we hope that it will have a positive impact on the lives of the Surui people and other Amazon tribes.

Open Source Developers @ Google Speaker Series: Raph Levien

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

On Monday, June 25th, Raph Levien will join us to present Lessons from Advogato. Raph, Advogato's founder, will give us insights into attack-resistant trust metrics and the other mechanisms used to build the website's user community.

Like all sessions of the Open Source Developers @ Google Speaker Series, Raph's presentation will be open to the public. Doors open at 6:30 PM at our Mountain View campus; guests should plan to sign in at Building 43 reception upon arrival. Refreshments will be served and all are welcome and encouraged to attend. Raph's presentation will also be taped and published along with all of the public Google Tech Talks.

For those of you who were unable to attend our last session, you can watch the video of Bob Lee's recent presentation Java on Guice: Dependency Injection the Java Way.

Weekly Google Code Roundup for June 11-15th

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

In API and developer-product news...

I will start by going meta. Linking to a roundup from a roundup makes your head spin, but we have two good ones:

Google Web Toolkit Video from Developer Day and Some Great Technical Blog Posts is a roundup itself of news in and around Google Web Toolkit.

The Community Response to Gears has been fantastic, so we tried to put together the various API abstractions, libraries, and applications that have already been built on Gears.

Using Multiple Pages in your Mashup shows you how building a mashup with the Google Mashup Editor isn't about one page maps. Paul shows you how you can create rich applications that span multiple pages.

We have a lot of great new articles and tutorials, such as:

• Converting a Maps API Mashup into a Mapplet
• Using PHP/MySQL with Google Maps and KML

Around Google

Blogger in Draft is a site for those on the bleeding edge with Blogger. Take a look at the current sneak ahead preview of Blogger.Next.

Aidan Chopra shows how you can create animated models for Google Earth. Watch the London Eye rotate as you see the people getting married at the top....

Featured Projects

Breakpad is an open-source multi-platform crash reporting system (Mac OS X, Linux, Windows).

Veloroutes is the perfect Maps API mashup for cycle enthusiasts. It has a lot of nice features including elevation information.

Google Tech Talks

Navigating the World's Photographs

This talk explores ways of transforming this massive, unorganized photo collection into visualizations of the world's sites, cities, and landscapes.

Introduction to MacLibre and OpenTouch

This presentation will cover an introduction to MacLibre & OpenTouch, both Google Summer of Code projects. The presentation will explore MacLibre as a new way of open source software distribution on Mac OS X, as well as OpenTouch as an open source framework for multimodal input devices.

View more tech talks.

Podcasts

The Joomla! Project

The entire Joomla! core team visited Google a few weeks ago, and Leslie Hawthorn got the chance to catch up with them about all things Summer of Code.

We'd love to hear from you

By Peter Deng, Google Developer Programs

Thanks to everyone who has sent in feedback about Google Developer Day. It really makes a difference. For instance, some of you pointed out that the U.S. session videos looked blurry, so we reencoded them at a higher bit rate. Others have asked for more code samples from the sessions. We're working on that too, so stay tuned.

Keep it coming! We're looking for feedback not just on GDD but on our developer program as a whole. We're always trying to make our APIs better. Sure, we have ideas about what to do next, but who better to tell us where to focus than you? Please take our survey before Wednesday, June 18. We promise to read all of your comments!

Google Maps in Sweden

Posted by Giorgo Scherl, Product Manager

Traveling to Sweden and want to make sure your hotel in Stockholm is actually close to the gorgeous waterfront? Or, if you are like me, you want to find a Pippi Langstrump (aka Pippi Longstocking) doll for your daughter while in Sweden. Well, now you can, as this search for Pippi on maps.google.se shows.

We are very pleased to announce today that Google has launched maps for Sweden. On maps.google.se we worked with Swedish content providers such as Eniro and Samtrafiken to integrate local business listings, public transport stations, and enhanced content like reviews and photos - in Swedish! This content is available on both Google maps and Google Earth.

Find your pizza in Luleå -- the northern city of Sweden or plan a trip from Stockholm to Göteborg. So go and virtually visit Sweden -- it's a great country.

Help Model a City!

Posted by Bruce Polderman, Business Product Manager

City planners have long used sophisticated 2D GIS and other mapping applications to manage community planning activities and to try and convey results to the general public. While they may be very effective analysis tools, these applications often fail to impart knowledge in a format that the average citizen can easily grasp. A 2D map, the architect's rendering, and a tabular summary are not tools that are familiar to the layperson. The world is 3D, and city planners are beginning to look at ways to present information that is more easily understood.

Some cities have gone so far as to create a physical model to help the community visualize existing and proposed land use conditions. This approach can be very costly, time consuming to create and maintain, a challenge to store, and difficult to view at a street level vantage point. This is one of the reasons Google Earth offers a 3D Buildings layer: to enable people - everyone, not just city planners - to understand their world in an easy, comprehensive way. Recognizing the growing use and awareness of Google Earth, some cities are beginning to publish their GIS data to the 3D Warehouse for display in the "3D Buildings" layer.

Recently, we introduced a new model category in the Google 3D Warehouse called "Help Model a City." This was in response to cities like San Jose, California, that don't have the resources to model a city on their own and who are hoping to enlist the help of 3D modeling ethusiasts. So far a few cities have published 3D "massing models" along with digital photos, making it easy for 3D modelers anywhere in the world to create visually accurate 3D textured buildings.

If you enjoy 3D modeling and would like to lend any of these cities a hand, I'm sure they would appreciate the help!

Weekly Google Code Roundup for June 4-8th

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

This week it felt like the day after the wedding. The developer day was complete, and now we need to move on, gather up the feedback from the community, and start on the real work of producing APIs and tools for you all.

In API and developer-product news...

DragZoomControl v1.0: Easier zooming, coming right up!

Andre Lewis has contributed his GZoom control to the Google Maps Utility Library which is a set of useful additions to the Maps API, distributed under an open source license. The new control is DragZoomControl, and does what it says on the box.

New KML Developments and Documentation

Mano Marks told us about the new documentation available that tells us about how to get Google to search your KML files, and the release of KML 2.2 beta reference material. KML will now support use of the Atom Syndication format atom:author and atom:uri elements for attribution.

AJAX Feed API Slide Show Enhancements

Mark Lucovsky upgraded the AJAX Feed API Slide Show to allow you to tweak the experience by using various callbacks that let you hook slide transitions, clicks, etc. For an example, he created a slideshow view
of PodTech that allows you to play videos inline as the appropriate image shows up.

Around Google

Google Calendar Gallery

The Google Calendar Gallery helps you find public calendars that may interest you. Plug in the Red Sox schedule, or the Netflix release dates, directly into your calendar.

FeedBurner Acquisition

FeedBurner lets you manage your feeds in interesting ways. You offload the traffic to the service, can add features on top of your own feed (enable Podcast on the fly, advertising, etc), and see great statistics on how your users are using it. We are proud to have the FeedBurner team part of the Google family.

Featured Projects

San Francisco Giants Mashup

Paul McDonald, of the Google Mashup Editor team, has put together a nice mashup on all things SF Giants. As with all Google Mashups, everyone is open source, and you can "view source" on anyones application. Take a peak at this example to see how you can use the mashup editor to do some sophisticated application building.

Remember The Milk Offline

The Remember The Milk team had an advantage. They were in Sydney where we released Gears, and they were obviously on the case. They quickly released an offline version of their TODO list application.

Google Tech Talks

Java on Guice: Dependency Injection, the Java Way

Bob Lee has been traveling the world speaking on Guice recently. This week he got to give his talk right here in Mountain View, and it was recorded for your viewing pleasure.

Hey, What's That? A Map Hack

Michael Kosowsky came to chat about his cool Maps application that lets you see what you could see from a high point (e.g. Longs Peak). Fun math and visualizations indeed.

Podcasts

Google Developer Podcast Episode Three: Mike Tsao on Google Gears

We got to interview Mike Tsao of the Google Gears team on how Gears came about, the design decisions, and lessons for developers as they go about offline-enabling their applications.

The Mono Project

Miguel de Icaza was joined by three former students for Mono: Aaron Tomb, Alan McGovern and Michael Hutchinson. They chat about the past, present, and future of Mono and what the summer of coders are working on now.

Google Developer Podcast Episode Three: Mike Tsao on Google Gears

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

Using iTunes?

We have published the third episode of the Google Developer Podcast, which delves into the world of offline applications, which is a hot topic right now. Let's get right to it.

Interview with Mike Tsao of the Google Gears team

We had the pleasure of interviewing Mike Tsao of the Google Gears team just before the Google Gears announcement went public.

It is a really fun chat, and lets us get into the mind of the Google Gears team a little.

In this interview you will learn:

• What Google Gears is at a high level
• How Google Gears came about
• The parts and pieces of Google Gears
• Information on the Datastore component (SQLite)
• Information on the ResourceStore and ManagedResourceStore components
• How the APIs look, and what should I be thinking about as I make my application offline
• How to handle versioning with Google Gears applications
• How the WorkerPool came about, and why we need to run JavaScript jobs in another thread
• The code contributions made back to the SQLite codebase (e.g. MATCH() added)
• The pain of finding the 90% case for syncing
• Thoughts on how the client is getting smarter
• How GWT supports Gears
• How Google Reader is using Gears
• How the UI fits in with offline behaviour
• The open source vision for Gears
• How other web platforms can access Gears
• Future ideas for Google Gears

News

We also discussed a little of the other news that happened just before Developer Day.

• Mapplets
• Google Maps Street View
• Google Web Toolkit 1.4

You can download the episode directly, or subscribe to the show (click here for iTunes one-click subscribe).

Several sample Google Mashup Editor applications

By DeWitt Clinton, Google Developer Programs

Now that the wraps are off of the Google Mashup Editor, we've begun to invite members of the public to participate in the beta. If you haven't received an invite yet, please hang tight; the interest has been flattering and we're sending out the invites in batches.

While you are waiting for your invite to arrive, the Google Mashup Editor team has posted several sample mashup applications to get you started, some developed by the team, and some developed by you. One of our favorites is the SF Giants baseball mashup, notable in part for integrating multiple data sources with just a handful of simple commands. Don't forget to view the source and see how it's all put together.

Check out the FAQ and follow along on the Google Mashup Blog. See you there!

Google Earth KML Gallery

Posted by Vaughn Tan, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Since Google Earth was launched, users have been exploring our world and creating content overlays (KML files) to share their explorations with others. We're now highlighting these KML files in the new Google Earth Gallery. To see the 6 new user-created KML files highlighted each week, you can either go to the website or add the gallery's Google Gadget to your iGoogle page.

The JetBlue point of view

Posted by Brett Muney, Manager Product Development, JetBlue

Summer is here again - a time when you, your friends and families start planning well-earned summer vacations. School is out, the sun is shining, and the weather is beautiful. To help you count down the minutes before you're wiggling your toes into the sand, JetBlue is now providing customers with Google Maps in all of its signature seatback TVs. Now everyone can enjoy a seat with a view: the new channel enables flyers to track flight altitude, speed, and location in real time on the way to any of JetBlue's 54 destinations.

To celebrate, JetBlue is asking customers to get snap-happy with the "JetBlue Point of View" photo contest. Between June 5 and September 3, snap a few photos out the window at 35,000 feet, log your location by flipping to the Google Maps channel on your seatback TV, and then submit your favorite image to JetBlue. After September 3, the top 10 photographers will be rewarded with roundtrip travel for two anywhere JetBlue flies. Here's more information on the contest for your chance to win.

The Ubucon Boulder

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Last weekend, Google's Boulder, Colorado engineering office hosted the first Ubucon to be held in Colorado. Around twenty Ubuntu developers, users and enthusiasts came together in unconference style to discuss topics from Launchpad to the new Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded project. You can find more details, including an awesome group photo and links to session notes, in the Colorado LoCo team's Ubucon Boulder write-up.

Hop on the bus, Gus. Or the train. Or the subway.

Posted by Christoph Oehler, Product Manager

For some time now we have been "painting" icons for transit stops into our maps. While it was helpful to be able to see where to catch a train or bus, it left a lot of people wishing they could click on the icon to get more information about a specific station. Now that's all changed! Depending on the data available for a given public transit system, Google Maps now shows the next departure times, what lines serve a specific station, and/or a link to the transit agency to get more detail. Try clicking on one of the little bus or tram icons on this map of Zurich, Switzerland, to see what we mean. You can also search for stations (for example "59th St - Columbus Circle Station, new york").

Our transit information is acquired through a variety of means, including transit agencies, geo data companies, websites, and maps. We are continuously working to expand our coverage. If you are interested in having this data available for your city, point your local transit agency to this website where they can learn more about how to upload their transit data.

For some cities we even provide a trip planner for public transportation: try it out. Here too we're working to expand the cities that we cover, so stay tuned.

Open Source Developers @ Google Speaker Series: Bob Lee

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Bob Lee will be joining us on Tuesday, June 5th, to discuss Java on Guice: Dependency Injection, the Java Way. Guice, an open-source dependency-injection framework for Java 5, is already in use in several Google projects. Come listen to the framework's creator explain how Guice can help make your applications simpler and easier to test!

As with all sessions of the Open Source Developers @ Google Speaker Series, Bob's presentation will be open to the public. Doors open at 6:30 PM at our Mountain View campus; guests should plan to sign in at Building 43 reception upon arrival. Refreshments will be served and all are welcome and encouraged to attend. Bob's presentation will also be taped and published along with all of the public Google Tech Talks.

For those of you who were unable to attend our last session, you can watch the video of Amit Singh's recent presentation on MacFuse.