Weekly Google Code Roundup: New Gears libraries, fixing mashups, GWT marries the iPhone, and more

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

It was perfect timing for Doug Crockford, the legendary Ajax curmudgeon, to come to Google to discuss Gears and the mashup problem. The same week that he chatted about the issues that we face, we saw some innovation and fun mashups abound (for example, this Campaign Trails mashup created with the Google Mashup Editor).

Just a few days after we released the ability to do authenticated, cross domain mashups with Google Calendar the JupiterIT folk created Traffik, a mashup that combines your Google Calendar with a Google Map, allowing you to login to view private events and create news ones. It is great to see early experiments with the API such as the Digg Oracle's use of WorkerPool that we went into more detail on.

Vortex is another library that sits on top of Google Gears to add functionality through a nice layer of abstraction. The library will detect if you are online or offline, and have a system to handle one use case for sync issues. Brian Dunnington liked what he saw with the Dojo Offline Toolkit, and took a lot of the ideas from there, giving us a version that isn't coupled to a particular Ajax library. Libraries like this are exactly what we want to see. Gears is aiming to give the community rock solid, low level components, and we expect to see interesting abstractions on top. XMLHttpRequest is to Prototype/Dojo/GWT as Gears it to [insert your cool new offline framework here].

After the GWT 1.4 launch / coming out of beta was announced, Bob Vawter of the GWT team was able to let his hair down and he created a GWT application for the iPhone to see what the experience was like. His take-away was:

The Google Web Toolkit can be used to create applications that, in the same code base, work well on an iPhone and a traditional desktop browser.

You can read more about the development of the GWT Feed Reader.

In other GWT news we interviewed folks from Queplix, an open source CRM company, about their experience building their products which use a lot of GWT, various Google APIs, and even the Google Mini!

Sticking to JavaScript for just a touch more, the Google Maps API team have added a new Local Search Control which makes it simple to search the map that you are on. You can add this control to your Maps mashup with a line of JavaScript.

In other API news, Jeff Scudder announced a new release of the GData Python client library which gives you access to various new releases and a refactored codebase.

What else?

• T.V. Raman kindly stopped by for a podcast interview on accessibility which may have some data and thoughts that surprise you.
• The Joomla! team updated us on their Summer of Code experience
• And, for those of you who write test code, you may recognize the battle cry of: But it works on my machine!. John Thomas talks about the stability of your tests.

As always, check out the latest tech talks, subscribe to the Google Developer Podcast and visit the Google Code YouTube channel.

Queplix discusses their GWT open source application

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

I was recently in New York City and had the chance to meet Steven Yaskin and Paul Tenberg of Queplix, a company that is trying to change the face of CRM using an open source business model. Steven and Paul are both old timers in the CRM industry, and it was very interesting to discuss their vision.

The interview focuses on QueWeb, the open source customer care application that they released. The application is built using GWT and uses a slew of Google APIs and products (such as the Google Mini). We discuss how open source affects their business, how their architected this CRM framework and details on some of the magic that allows you to slurp up legacy applications and hand you back an open source version built with GWT widgets. This enables you to tweak the functionality without being in the proprietary black box. As part of this effort, they created a slew of GWT widgets for reuse. All of this is hosting in their Google Code project.

Watch the full interview below, which ends with a short demo of QueWeb.



Thanks again to Steven and Paul for taking the time to meet.

Calling all 3D Google Earth files

Posted by Mark Limber, Product Manager

We love seeing all the great 3D SketchUp models that pop up in the 3D Warehouse. You can find everything from abstract art to buildings. The very best georeferenced content appears in the 'Best of 3D Warehouse' layer in Google Earth, which everyone can see just by turning on the '3D Buildings' layer.

SketchUp is a great tool for creating Google Earth models, but we know sometimes you'll want to go beyond what it can do to create the effect you want. Take all the cool animations out there, for instance. So we've opened up the 3D Warehouse to all 3D Google Earth files!

Look for this new button on the homepage of the 3D Warehouse:


This takes you to a simple upload page. You provide the KMZ file, an image representing the file and a description ... and voila! It's in the 3D Warehouse — searchable, shareable and, with a little luck, destined for the 'Best of 3D Warehouse' layer for millions to see. If you're using SketchUp to create the KMZ, please make sure you export to the filetype labeled Google Earth 4 for best results.

We look forward to seeing what appears next.

Google Developer Podcast Episode Nine: The status of accessibility on the Web

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

Using iTunes?

T.V. Raman is a Research Scientist at Google who knows a thing or two about accessibility. We took the opportunity to interview him, and Hubbell, his seeing-eye dog (who was nice and quiet).

We started out by asking the honest question that developers ask about accessibility: "What is in it for me?". T.V. discusses the practical issues, and what you should be doing with respect to accessibility, and how it is one piece of the usability picture.

We then delve into the problems of developing accessible websites, and solutions to some of the problems.

If you listen to the interview you will learn:

• How not to develop in a user-agent specific manner
• Fun issues with screen readers
• How audio CAPTCHA brings equality to the pain of CAPTCHA, and how people who can see use the audio ones
• How painful is the Web to view for a blind person
• Using the Google Web Transcoder (the other GWT!) to clean up pages
• How CSS hasn't been as leveraged as much as we would like
• How the increase in mobile and widget platforms has a side effect of accessible views
• How RIA applications deal with accessibility
• How T.V. has written custom clients for Google APIs
• What standards groups are doing in the accessibility space
• Dealing with Python, a language that cares about whitespace, as a blind man.
  

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

Also, check out an accessible web search for the visually impaired.

Street View and Privacy

Posted by Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel

Street View is a service that lets people view and navigate within 360 degree street level imagery of various cities in the US. It provides users with a rich, immersive browsing experience directly in Google Maps, enabling greater understanding of a specific location or area. Since we launched Street View in May, we have released imagery for seven US cities. We thought hard about how to design Street View so that the service would respect the privacy of people who happen to be walking down a public street at the random moment when we capture an image. That's why we designed a simple process for anyone to contact us and have their image removed. In the US, there's a long and noble tradition of "public spaces," where people don't have the same expectations of privacy as they do in their homes. This tradition helps protect journalists, for example. So we have been careful to only collect images that anyone could see walking down a public street. However we've always said that Street View will respect local laws wherever it is available and we recognize that other countries strike a different balance between the concept of "public spaces" and individuals' right to privacy in those public spaces. In other parts of the world local laws and customs are more protective of individuals' right to privacy in public spaces, and therefore they have a more limited concept of the right to take and publish photographs of people in public places. Street View isn't available outside of the US yet, but when it is, we'll be sure to respect local laws. We understand that means that we'll have to ensure that there aren't identifiable faces and license plates in some countries. There's an important public policy debate in every country around what privacy means in public spaces. That balance will vary from country to country, and Street View will respect it.

Weekly Google Code Roundup: JavaScript and GData can now write home, Gadget Ads, presentations, and more.

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

We had a really fun week with launches and news across a myriad of products. From a technical perspective, it was really exciting to see the launch of a new GData JavaScript library that enables full CRUD access from the browser. No need for proxies. Jun Yang, engineer on the GData team, sat down to explain the API and how it works. People will remember when the mainstream thought it was impossible to do full read/write authenticated cross domain access in a secure way.

Jason Cooper, of the Google Mashup Editor team, took the new API that works with Google Calendar, and provided a mashup that is able to create new events in your calendar.

Speaking of JavaScript APIs, The Digg Oracle is a new Google Gears application that showcases the pattern of sucking down data, and allowing you to do local manipulations and data filtering in the client. It makes heavy use of the WorkerPool and the local database. See it in action.

The Google Maps API has also gotten some new features and news. First, a new IP based limit is coming soon, and new enhanced map tiles are available. You can also use custom map types via the Google Maps API Open Source Utility Library.

In the land of open source, Leslie showcased the summer of coders of 2007, and released a podcast on all things GCC. We also discussed our thoughts on the ISO decision on OOXML, and the Google Code for Educators program released a series of lectures on MapReduce.

The Google Gadget and AdSense universes combined for the introduction of Google Gadget Ads, which are customized "mini-sites" that run as ads on AdSense publisher websites. These ads are interactive, engaging, and will appeal to your users, simultaneously providing value to advertisers while getting visitors to stick around your site. The end result is that advertisers get more engaged users, users have a richer ad experience, and publishers opted in to image ads may see increased competition for their ad space.

When you check out your ads, you can watch what is going on via Google Analytics, and the team has created a series of videos to teach you about many advanced features.

These videos could have included a presentation, and now you can create presentations from within Google Docs itself. Now we the great collaboration experience that we have for docs and spreadsheets can be had for your presentations. Please use this power for good, and no slides with 20 bullet points!

To finish up, I can get quick access to results from two of my favourite sports. A quick cricket search gives me all of the Twenty20 scores, and iGoogle gives me the rugby world cup results.

All in all a great week! As always, check out the latest tech talks, subscribe to the Google Developer Podcast and visit the Google Code YouTube channel.

New GData JavaScript library enables full read and write access for your mashups

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

I am really excited to see the release of the GData JavaScript Client Library for Calendar that allows you to do a lot more with Calendar GData mashups.

Developers have been able to work with our GData feeds from JavaScript for over a year, but only in a read-only capacity. There are plenty of mashups that can be done that way, but what if you want an application that ties into personal content? What if you would like to write an Ajax client that can create, update, or delete entries as well as read it?

Now you can. This release allows you full read-write access to Google Calendar from JavaScript. Instead of requiring server-side proxies to do this for you, AuthSub is fully supported from within the pure JavaScript client.

You can login by doing something similar to:

function logMeIn() {
 scope = "http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds";
 var token = google.accounts.user.login(scope);
}

function setupMyService() {
 var myService =
   new google.gdata.calendar.CalendarService('exampleCo-exampleApp-1');
 logMeIn();
 return myService;
}

I got to sit down with Jun Yang, who worked on this code, and got his take on the new library:



Armed with this new functionality, I can only imagine how the mashups will become richer. I can't wait to see them!

Custom icons for your maps

Posted by Keith Golden, Software Engineer, Google Maps

When we first started developing the map creation tools in Google Maps, I found a turkey hiding among the Maps placemark icons, a Thanksgiving leftover, no doubt. I proposed we include it in our icon menu. For some reason, no one else on the team seemed to think that was a good idea. I'm guessing few of you have been clamoring for a turkey, but perhaps you have wished for some other symbol that we neglected to include.

Today we've added support for custom icons, so now you can use any image on the web for your placemarks. Just click on the new 'Add an icon' link in the icon menu, type the URL into the dialog box, and you're good to go. I typed in http://google.com/mapfiles/turkey.png to get my majestic bird.



You can also make up your own icons. Although many image formats will work, PNGs with transparent backgrounds look best on the map. Another idea is to use photo thumbnails. Here's a map showing where some of my teammates and I come from.



As an added bonus, all the new icons you add to a map are listed under the 'My icons' tab in the icon menu, making it easy to reuse them for other placemarks.

Previewing content in Google Earth

Posted by Wei Luo, Senior GIS Specialist

You might go to Google Earth to look up something specific—your house, your next vacation spot or close-up pictures of elephants in Africa, for example. Or sometimes you might just feel like wandering the earth, diving in to find out more about a particular location or topic. But where do you start? There's so much fascinating content in Google Earth created by partners like National Geographic Magazine, the Jane Goodall Institute and NASA that it can be hard to get going. We're happy to announce that we've added a 'preview' layer, a selection of placemarks that highlight our many content layers, to help make this exploration easier. It's a new, easy way to see what's out there without getting overwhelmed.

Say, for instance, you're exploring the southwestern region of the United States, and you click on a National Geographic placemark over Arizona. And then, after reading about the Grand Canyon, you get curious about what other photos National Geographic has of the region. Just click on the 'Show this layer' link at the top of the bubble, and you'll be able to explore this area more fully.

Here's what you'd see in the National Geographic 'preview' layer:



And here's what you'd see after clicking on the 'Show this layer' link. When you're finished looking, you can click "Hide this layer" and the National Geographic icons will disappear.

Updates from the Django Sprint

by Adrian Holovaty, Django core developer

More than 200 people around the world devoted their time and brainpower to improving the Django Web framework this weekend, during a scheduled Django coding sprint. On Friday, September 14th, the first day of the sprint, some Django developers gathered at Google's offices in Chicago and Mountain View for the benefits of in-person communication, camaraderie and, yes, free food.

17 people showed up at Google Chicago, which was a sort of ground zero for the sprint, with the project's BDFLs Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-Moss in attendance. Another 7 people participated from Google's Mountain View office, which was linked with Chicago via videoconference.

Python creator (and Google employee) Guido van Rossum even stopped by via videoconference to give a pep talk about Django version 1.0 and share some of his experience running a large open-source project.

The sprint was intensely productive, with more than 400 tickets closed in the Django issue-tracking system, 300 new patches/ticket attachments and more than 200 commits to the Django code base. All told, there were more than 2,440 changes, including wiki changes, ticket changes, patch uploads and code check-ins.

Overall, the consensus was: "We should do this more often!"


The Chicago sprinters, hard at work (photo by Jacob Kaplan-Moss)

Every percent counts

Posted by Chris Harrelson, Software Engineer, Google Transit

The Google Transit team has been busy lately. In the last few weeks alone we've added trip planning coverage for:

- Buses and light rail in Dallas, Texas
- The Las Vegas Monorail
- Humboldt County, CA
- Thousand Oaks, CA
- Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART)

I'm especially excited about this last one, since it's our first partner agency to serve my hometown of Berkeley, CA. Oh, and there's one more reason I like BART. As you may know, Google Transit began its life as a 20 percent project. Now, the fine folks at BART have furthered their collaboration with us in BART 1 percent time which is like 20 percent time, only, as our friends at BART explain, "it's one person and 19 percent less time." This data is available for anyone who wants to access it in the Google Transit Feed Specification, a creative commons-licensed data format we've developed to help facilitate sharing of data within the transit community.

There's also great news for Europe. We've added transit stop icons to Google Maps for a new batch of cities. In addition to Dublin, Ireland and Linz, Austria, the following 12 cities in Germany have also joined the club: Augsburg, Bielefeld, Bochum, Bunde, Dresden, Jena, Karlsruhe, Kassel, Lubeck, Mainz, Rostock and Trier.

Australia readies itself for a Google Maps election

Posted by Alan Noble, Google Australia

It might not be widely known to our friends in the northern hemisphere, but a federal election is due to take place in Australia before the end of the year. Nothing captures the public's attention or stirs emotion quite like an election, however, many of our citizens do not have easy access to electorate information. A recent launch in Sydney of a Google Australian election website helps to remedy this by providing Australian voters with an intimate look at the parties, candidates and election issues.



The main product for this initiative is an electorate Mapplet, which identifies which parties hold what seats, who the sitting member is and what margin they currently enjoy. It has a number of interactive features that allow people to analyze the political landscape in depth. And once the election is called, we intend to add polling booth locations and even more candidate information.

It is worth noting that this Mapplet was built with publicly accessible data using Google Pages for hosting and is something any developer could have constructed — all of the tools we used are available to the public. For more information, please view the product demo below.



Happy voting, Australia.

Linux Kernel-Userland Interface Design, Testing, and Documentation: An Update from LinuxConf EU, and the 2007 Linux Kernel Summit

By Michael Kerrisk, Software Engineering Team

As you may know,Google allows its engineers to spend 20% of their time on projects independent of their regular day to day job. For my 20% time, I chose to continue and expand my work on maintaining the Linux man-pages.

Since April, we've managed to ship 21 new releases, with a dozen or so new pages, and around 400 major and minor improvements to existing pages.

My work on the Linux Man-pages project man-pages led me to talk about kernel-userland interface design, testing, and documentation at the recent LinuxConf Europe, where my Zurich colleague Roman Marxer also spoke about Google's recently open-sourced Ganeti virtual server management software.

I was lucky enough to be invited to the immediately following USENIX Linux Kernel Developers Summit, where I joined Google colleagues Andrew Morton, Paul Menage, and Martin Bligh to participate in the discussion of current topics related to kernel development, including the topic of kernel-userland API design, testing, and documentation.

You can read my talk, and in-depth coverage of the Kernel Developer Summit at LWN.net. It's available to LWN.net subscribers only until the 20th of September, but you can already see the obligatory group photo.



Googlers Andrew Morton and Paul Menage relaxing at the end of the Linux Kernel Summit, Cambridge, England

(photo credit: Michael Kerrisk)

Ed. note: Post updated to fix typo.

Google welcomes ISO decision on OOXML

By Zaheda Bhorat, Open Source Team

Google welcomes the ISO decision to not approve the fast track of Office Open XML (OOXML) proposed standard DIS 29500 (ECMA 376).

Our engineers conducted an independent analysis of the OOXML specification and found several areas of concern, which we communicated both to the ISO and to the public. These include and are not limited to the following:

• for a specification of this size it was not given enough time for review;
• the undocumented features of OOXML prevents its implementation by other vendors;
• dependencies on other Microsoft proprietary formats and their technical defects makes it difficult to fully implement; and
• the overall cost for vendors of implementing multiple standards (hence the lack of OOXML implementations in the marketplace).

It is also incompatible with the existing ISO standard ISO 26300:2006, the Open Document Format (ODF), which already offers a high degree of interoperability, wide support, and offers the level playing field the world needs. Google is a supporter of ODF and has successfully integrated this open format into Google Docs and Spreadsheets. ODF also enjoys implementation in over twelve other products.

The ISO approval required at least 2/3 (i.e., 66.66%) of the votes cast by participating (P) members to be positive, and no more than 1/4 (i.e., 25%) of the total number of national body votes cast negative. Neither of these criteria were met by the proposed standard.

The concerns from many technical experts around the world were submitted as comments by the voting bodies to ISO on September 2, 2007. These must now be resolved at a Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) on February 25-29, 2008. In contrast, ODF was approved unanimously (23-0 among P members, 31-0 overall) as an international standard by ISO in May 2006.

As we represented our position in many countries, we were encouraged by the process observed in some places that truly evaluated the proposed standard on its technical merits as well as the feasibility of implementing the standard for the people of the country. These countries successfully declined or abstained due to insufficient information about the standard or the lack of time to evaluate the specification. In addition, many irregularities have been reported in the voting process (see here, here and here).

Technical standards should be arrived at transparently, openly, and based on technical merit. Google is committed to helping the standards community remain true to this ideal and maintain their independence from any commercial pressure.

Google supports one open document format and calls on industry participants to collaboratively work on ODF. With multiple implementations of one open standard for documents, users, businesses and governments around the world can have both choice and freedom to access their own documents, share with others and pass onto future generations.

More of the world for you to explore

Posted by Dave Barth, Product Manager

Here's great news for all of the virtual explorers out there: Today we added 54 new countries to Google Maps! We've more than doubled our coverage of Latin America and are now mapping three times as many countries in Asia as before. So if you've ever wanted to get the flavor of an energetic metropolis like Mexico City or scope out the relaxed vibe of a small island like Aruba, we've got you covered.

Here's the full list of new countries:
Afghanistan, Aruba, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belize, Bermuda, Brunei Darussalam, Bhutan, Bolivia, Cambodia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Fiji, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Indonesia, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Kuwait, Laos, Lebanon, Mexico, Myanmar (Burma), Mongolia, Nepal, Nicaragua, Oman, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Timor-Leste, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yemen

We have better detail for some countries than others, but this is just the beginning. In coming months, we'll be working tirelessly to add more detail to the existing countries in Google Maps, and we'll also be adding new countries to the list.

UW and Google: Teaching in Parallel

By Sierra Michels-Slettvet, Engineering Intern

Earlier this year, the University of Washington partnered with Google to develop and implement a course to teach large-scale distributed computing based on MapReduce and the Google File System (GFS). The goal of developing the course was to expose students to the methods needed to address the problems associated with hundreds (or thousands) of computers processing huge datasets ranging into terabytes. I was excited to take the first version of the class, and stoked to serve as a TA in the second round.

But you can't program air, so Google provided a cluster computing environment to get us started. And since computers can't program themselves (yet?), UW provided the most essential component: students with sweet ideas for a huge cluster. After learning the ropes with these new tools, students finished the course by producing an impressive array of final projects, including an n-body simulator, a bot to perform Bayesian analysis on Wikipedia edits to search for spam, and an RSS aggregator that clustered news articles by geographic location and displayed them using the Google Maps API. Check out Geozette.

We are looking at ways to encourage other universities to get similar classes going, so we've also published the course material that was used at the University of Washington on Google Code for Educators. You're more than welcome to check out the Google Summer Intern video lectures on MapReduce, GFS, and parallelizing algorithms for large scale data processing. This summer I've been working on exposing these educational resources and other tools so that anyone can work on and think about cool distributed computing problems without the overhead of installing his or her own cluster. In that vein, we've released a virtual machine containing a pre-configured single node instance of Hadoop that has the same interface as a full cluster without any of the overhead. Feel free to give it a whirl.

We're happy to be able to expose students and researchers to the tools Googlers use everyday to tackle enormous computing challenges, and we hope that this work will encourage others to take advantage of the incredible potential of modern, highly parallel computing. Virtually all of this material is Creative Commons licensed, and we encourage educators to remix it, build upon it, and discuss it in the Google Code for Educators Forum.

Lastly, a quick shout out to the other interns who helped out on our team this summer: Aaron Kimball, Christophe Taton, Kuang Chen, and Kat Townsend. I'll miss you guys!

The new moon

Posted by Michael Weiss-Malik, Software Engineer

Despite its phase changes, the same side of the moon always faces Earth, like a giant eyeball keeping watch over us. And for most of history, that's all we ever did in return: stare back. Until 1969, that is, when Neil Armstrong took his famous first steps. It's not easy to fly to the moon yourself, but we can offer the next best thing.

As you may have heard, we've released a new version of Google Moon, one that fully eclipses its predecessor. This update brings higher-resolution map imagery, text search, and photos and stories from every Apollo landing. We even included Street View-style panoramas of the moon's surface, taken by the Apollo astronauts ... something you won't see anywhere else. And last but certainly not least, we tossed in scientific charts that are good enough for actual mission planning and science classrooms alike. Check out the about page for more info on all of these features.

Just like the Apollo landings, this was a genuine group effort. Noel Gorelick and I worked with our colleagues at NASA Ames Research Center to apply the work that we did for Google Mars to the moon. It was an opportunity made possible by Google and NASA's Space Act Agreement, and we hope to continue this collaboration with talented researchers like Matt Hancher, Michael Broxton, Noelle Steber, and the rest of the Ames team on other great space-related projects.

The new Google Moon makes a nice addition to our growing space family, which also includes Google Mars and Sky. If you haven't already, be sure to check out each of these great educational tools.

KML 2.2

Posted by Mano Marks, Google Geo API Team

On May 31, at Developer Day, Google previewed early beta documentation for KML 2.2, the latest update to our geographic data presentation language. That preview introduced a number of important features to KML, including:

• PhotoOverlay
• Camera
• Atom attribution elements
• Limiting session length in NetworkLinks
• Linking between features

When Google Earth 4.2 was released on August 22, KML 2.2 Beta was officially released, with some additions to what was previewed in May. Here's what's new:

• ExtendedData, which allows sophisticated balloon templating and gives you the ability to embed your own custom-typed data in KML files. For more information, see the Adding Custom Data page.
  
• Linking between features. There was a syntax change for this feature. For more information, see the KML 2.2 Reference.
• Sky Data. For more information, see the Sky Data in KML page.

Very soon now, KML 2.2 will be exiting beta. I've started a discussion in the KML Developer Support group, so please give us your feedback on the new features of KML 2.2 as soon as possible. We look forward to hearing from you.

Greener maps

Posted by Steve Miller, Product Manager, Google Earth Outreach

We love it when you put our products to work to help the environment. Individuals and organizations have come up with all sorts of creative ways to create maps that highlight the causes that they care most about, and we wanted to recap just a few cool examples from this summer.

In June, the Commission for Environmental Cooperation released a layer for Google Earth that tracks pollution from industrial locations across the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Another Google Earth user did the same for Australia using the country's National Pollutant Inventory. Do you know where to find pollution data for your own country?

If you're interested in alternative energy, the San Francisco Solar Map shows the locations of solar installations around the city. We also found this great wind power assessment tool that calculates wind speeds at a given location, intended to help with planning wind farm installations. And in British Columbia, an individual mapped water licenses governing hydroelectric power generation. This layer publishes the locations where power companies intend to divert rivers and streams in order to generate electricity, inspiring discussions about the pros and cons of different energy sources.

One last cool thing: Walk Score created a map to show people what's within walking distance of residential areas. So if you're thinking about moving, you can easily see how you'll be able to cut down on trips to the gas station.

Want to protect your own corner of the planet? Check out some more examples, learn how to create your own layer and be sure to let us know what you come up with.

Weekly Google Code Roundup: Learning to Remember The Milk offline, flying over Earth, and searching your feeds

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

On the back of the stream of developer releases last week, we had some interesting activity in the community, and from our own product teams.

Omar Kilani, of the Remember The Milk team, did a fantastic, thorough write-up of his experience getting his product working offline with Gears. The article moves past an introduction to delve into the design decisions around an offline-capable architecture, and user messaging and presentation of state. We learn why Omar decided to go with the explicit offline mode, and then the five steps to offline conversion.

The Google Mashup Editor team has also been churning out new features based on your feedback. As a developer you can now enable public read only $user feed so that applications can share $user feeds to create social applications, edit XML, CSS and HTML files uploaded into the editor, work with Gadget files, and much more.

The cool easter egg of the week goes to the flight simulator that is in the most recent Google Earth application. There is something special about flying around the grand canyon, or over manhattan. Give it a try.

Flying is cool, but we all love searching. The Google Reader team released the much anticipated feature of being able to search across your feeds. If you knew that you had read about something a few days ago but couldn't find it, now you can.

Sharing is a kin to searching, and the Google Book Search, which had a significant Ajax facelift a year ago, has joined the two. A summer intern added the ability to save snippets from public domain books, and embed them to your website. It is as simple as selecting the text you want, and how you want to show it (an image of just text).

Featured Media

Mark Stahl, tech lead of the Google data APIs, talked to us about GData, the history behind it, the parts and pieces, and how people are implementing applications on top of it.

Quicksilver is a keyboard-driven launcher that is the first application that I install when I get a new Mac. Nicholas Jitkoff, creator of Quicksilver, is a Google employee on the Mac team, and they finally got him to talk all about Quicksilver: past, present, and future.

Mark Utting came to talk about Model-Based Testing and he compares two different kinds of test model: black-box models and white-box models.

As always, check out the latest tech talks, subscribe to the Google Developer Podcast and visit the Google Code YouTube channel.

Where do you want to fly today?

Posted by Gerhard Wesp, Software Engineer, Google Earth

Word is out that the new version of Google Earth includes a hidden Flight Simulator. Good sleuthing!

You might be wondering why we hid it in the first place. Well, we know that discovery is what Google Earth is all about, and you've proven yourselves quite adept at finding the unexpected. We knew it would only be a matter of time before you happened upon this new, enjoyable way to appreciate the spectacular scenery in Google Earth.

Check out the Swiss Alps from this vantage point:



And the Grand Canyon:



If you haven't tried it yet, we encourage you to give it a go. The two plane models featured in the simulator are intended to be easy to fly, even for non-pilots. There are no complicated engine-start or takeoff procedures — simply add power and off you go.

Frank Taylor, author of the Google Earth Blog, has compiled some flying tips, which you can use to get started. I'd say the most important thing to know is that flying is much easier with mouse controls (or a joystick if you have one) instead of the keyboard.

Another tip: If you don't yet have the "Enter Flight Simulator" item in your tools menu, you can activate the simulator by entering "Lilienthal" in the "Fly To" box. It just so happens that this magic little word works in the same way that the key combination Ctrl+Alt+A does.

Once you've found a nice vantage point, just use the space bar to pause the simulator and enjoy the view for a moment. Then, you can calmly look around using the control and cursor keys.

Safe travels!

Google Developer Podcast Episode Eight: The world of Google data APIs

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

Mark Stahl is a technical lead on the Google data APIs team. Many of the APIs that Google offers are part of the Google data API family, so we thought it would be prudent to get some time to chat with him, and discuss all things GData.

Using iTunes?

If you are new to GData, or want to learn more, listen to the podcast to hear:

• What "Google data API" actually means (the parts and pieces)
• What Atom, Atom Publishing Protocol, and other tech behind GData are all about
• What GData adds to the mix on top of Atom and APP
• How Atom compares to RSS
• What are ETags? And how can they help me?
• Why REST, the style, was chosen for these APIs
• Where REST makes sense, and where it doesn't. Resource driven vs. RPC.
• What the first GData APIs were
• How the killer app of syncing data with Google Calendar
• How you actually use the APIs? What do they need to learn? What tools do we give them?
• Can you write APIs that implement the same GData APIs?
• And much more.

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

Happy trails

Posted by Keith Golden, Software Engineer, Google Maps

As many of you have discovered, the line tool in Google Maps is a great way to create maps of your bike routes and hiking trails. But something has been missing: After plotting out a hike in Yosemite, how do you know whether it's going to be a 2-hour hike or a 2-day hike? You can't tell how long the trail is!

Well, now you can. We've added distance measurement to the line tool. Whenever you draw a line, you'll see the current distance as you move the mouse and add new points. The distance is also displayed in the info window when you click on your completed line.



Here's one of my favorite trails. I cut through several switchbacks as I was drawing the path, so the distance wasn't very accurate initially. Luckily, it's easy to refine a path by dragging on the "ghost points" (those translucent squares that appear at the midpoint of each line segment) to add detail in the middle of a completed line. As I did so, I watched the distance increase.



And there it is: a lovely hiking trail in all its wiggly glory. At 12.7 miles round trip, there's no need to pack a tent, but I hope someone remembers the trail mix.

Mercedes-Benz Search & Send uses Google Maps

Posted by Tricia Murdy, Telematics Analyst, MBUSA, LLC, and Thomas Bock, Senior Systems Engineer, DaimlerChrysler REDNA Inc.

We are pleased to announce the launch of Mercedes-Benz Search & Send, a new service that enables you to send destinations directly from Google Maps to select Mercedes-Benz vehicles equipped with Tele Aid. Mercedes-Benz is the first automotive manufacturer to offer this functionality in the U.S.

Search and Send is a convenient way to plan trips from the comfort of your own home or office. Using Google Maps, you can search for a destination online and send it right to your car. You can even have colleagues or family members send a destination to your car while you're on the road.



Once in your car, there's no need to spend time in putting data into your navigation system. Simply push the i-button of the Mercedes-Benz Tele Aid system and the destination will be downloaded directly from Google Maps to your navigation system. You will be prompted to either start route guidance immediately or save the information for later use in your navigation memory.



For more information please visit www.mbusa.com/searchandsend.