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Seo Master present to you: By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

It has been a busy time recently. The Zoho team announced offline support for their Writer application this week, so we met at their offices and talked to them about their experience. This is our first video talk, but more are in the works, so head over to our new YouTube channel.

If you are a Mac developer you now have access to more of our APIs via the updated Google Data APIs Objective-C Client Library. You can now work with Google Code Search, Picasa Web Albums, and do more with Google Calendars.

Speaking of Google Calendar, we introduced Calendar Gadgets which allow you to add behaviour to your calendar via Gadgets. Some early examples include adding horoscopes, sudoku puzzles that get harder throughout the week, and the ability to keep up with the all important celebrity birthdays.

If you are new to Gadgets, Alan Williamson has written a nice introduction to creating a Gadget for the Google Desktop.

The maps world has been productive. The big news of the week is the ability to embed a Map in a YouTube like way. Now you don't need to code to be able to build a map, and place it anyway you wish.

This doesn't mean the API is slowing down. Richard Garland wrote about a new cluster zoom feature that ties DragZoom and Marker Manager.

Introducing Sky in Google Earth has gotten a lot of people excited. Looking down at the earth is great, but being able to sit on your back and look up at the stars is just what you want on a nice summer night. Now you can do just that.

Featured Projects

Who's Web maps out various Web 2.0 talent on a rich Maps API implementation.

Zoho Writer has gone offline... in a good way. Now you can keep some of your docs available for that plane trip. Read more.

Featured Media

I got into a nice conversation with fellow Googler, and EAI expert, Gregor Hohpe at MashupCamp. Listen to the conversation about enterprise Mashups and the Google Mashup Editor.

Salesforce developers came to our offices and gave an Overview and Q&A on AppExchange.

John Resig of Mozilla and jQuery gave a talk on Best Practices in Javascript Library Design based on his work on both the jQuery library, and the new FUEL library for building Firefox plugins.

Michael Still talked about Practical MythTV, which covered the powerful open source personal video recorder.

Leslie Hawthorn has made all of her Summer of Code podcasts available in ogg format!

As always, check out the latest tech talks.2013, By: Seo Master

Seo Master present to you: By Christian LaForte, Feeling Software

COLLADA, the standard 3D interchange format, makes it much easier to translate complex animated 3D models across Google Earth, Google Sketch-Up, Adobe Photoshop, Epic Games' Unreal Engine 3, Autodesk Maya, and many other applications. COLLADA integrates 3D geometry, textures, complex material, complex skeletal and facial animation, physical simulations, and many more aspects. With such power comes complexity: integrating COLLADA from scratch in your application is not for the faint-hearted. Luckily developers have created reusable libraries to simplify this process, including FCollada, which is open-source, well tested, can import all versions of COLLADA and has been integrated into many applications.

We've worked on development of FCollada over the past two years, thanks to support from Google's Open Source Progams Office. Until recently, the library was only offered for Windows; it is now available for Mac OS X and several Linux distributions.

Google's sponsorship also enabled us to distribute and support two additional tools for Linux and Mac OS X enthusiasts:

• ColladaMaya, a complete COLLADA translator designed for Autodesk Maya. It's now available for all three major platforms under the MIT license.


• Feeling Viewer, a reference viewer for COLLADA content, supports all standard COLLADA features. A stand-alone version of the viewer is available for free on Linux and Mac.

2013, By: Seo Master

Seo Master present to you: By Chris Holmes, The Open Planning Project

Last year, Google's Open Source Programs Office funded the GeoServer Project to add support to output data to Google Earth. In the venture capital world, there is a notion of 'seed funding': putting capital into a new, usually risky, project to try out an idea and help it reach a state of sustainability. Google wanted to promote the idea of using 'Network Links' in KML to enable organizations to put large amounts of existing geospatial data onto Google Earth. They found fertile ground in the open source GeoServer Project, where the seed would not have to grow in isolation, but instead could flourish alongside other improving components.

GeoServer was started by a non-profit called The Open Planning Project (TOPP) in 2001, with the goal of making geospatial data more available through open standards - not just images but the actual data, the 'source code' of the map. This opens the information to enable analysis, modeling and user corrections. Today it is a vital open source project, with many outside contributors. The latest release (download) contains a number of new additions for Google Earth, which the community has helped shape and improve over the last year.

New features include the ability to easily customize placemark pop-ups from existing data, support for 'Super-Overlays', powerful time visualization, and automatic generation of legends. These are all available from a variety of data sources, including PostGIS, Oracle Spatial, DB2, ArcSDE, Shapefiles, GeoTiffs, and ArcGrid, with more being added every day by the community. There are also several related improvements, including the ability to overlay data dynamically on Google Maps, as well as GeoRSS and GeoJSON output.

Other Google Earth-related news: TOPP is participating in a testbed put on by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to help figure out what the next version of the KML specification may look like. The GeoServer team is very excited about KML becoming an OGC open standard, as GeoServer already implements the main OGC standards. For the testbed TOPP will build support for the new version of KML in to GeoServer and OpenLayers, an excellent AJAX mapping client. To follow and participate in the work being done on the next version of KML, subscribe and contribute to the ogckml page on del.icio.us.2013, By: Seo Master

Seo Master present to you:
By John Taylor, Lead Game Designer, Travel Game

This post is part of Who's at Google I/O, a series of guest blog posts written by developers who are appearing in the Developer Sandbox at Google I/O.


Travel Game is the first online social game powered by Google Earth, and the first game of its kind to provide players with real, free travel rewards. Currently in beta testing, Travel Game is being unveiled for the first time at Google I/O 2011. Travel Game was conceived by Jeff Katz, a technology and travel industry veteran, and founding CEO of Orbitz, Inc.

Touristo and Skydiver, our first two titles, provide players with the experience of sky diving over the Earth and navigating a Touristo vehicle through exotic locales via Google Earth’s virtual 3D globe. To take advantage of the awesome imagery, terrain, and 3D models available in Google Earth, we built a custom framework that ties into several Google APIs, including Google Earth, Google Maps, and even Google’s currency converter API.


We wanted to give users the best possible experience – with high-quality game play, animations, and sound – so we based our framework on a blend of Javascript, Flash, and a custom back-end, all tied into the Google Earth APIs. We designed an XML structure that lets our game designers add new game packs easily and – some day – we may give users tools to do the same.

For example, part of our framework lets game designers add “targets” inside Google Earth using XML like this:

<target action="addTarget">
    <itemPath>assets/images/blank.png</itemPath>
    <longitude>-157.8459651634087</longitude>
    <latitude>21.31249095467307</latitude>
    <imageRadius>.0000018</imageRadius>
    <targetRadius>20</targetRadius>
</target>

We created a Javascript architecture to interpret the XML and make several calls to the Google Earth API to set up the scene and add 3D models as markers for the target. We then track the user’s position relative to the target using Google Earth’s ground overlays. This involves a lot of background processing, but we were surprised at how well it performs.

Based on the social trends we know are emerging in real travel, we’re also tying features into Facebook, like posting places visited in Travel Game to your wall, sending gifts to friends, and eventually inviting friends to play along for group prizes. We’re even injecting the user’s Facebook photos into Google Earth.


The current beta version of Travel Game has been developed and nurtured by a team of travel and gaming industry experts. We’re extremely excited about creating online exploration that translates into real-world experiences. At this point, we’re just scratching the surface and see great potential for creating more great games and social communities as an overlay to Google Earth.


Come see Travel Game in the Developer Sandbox at Google I/O on May 10-11.

John Taylor has been designing and developing software for 20 years for companies like Electronic Arts, Lucas Learning, and the Disney Channel. Before that, he circled the globe a few times and worked as a writer and film editor.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

2013, By: Seo Master

Seo Master present to you: This post is part of the Who's @ Google I/O, a series of blog posts that give a closer look at developers who'll be speaking or demoing at Google I/O. Today's post is a guest post written by Ron Hess from Salesforce.com.

Recently I had the great pleasure of working with a team of folks from the Salesforce.com Foundation, Google Earth Outreach, Foundation clients and internal salesforce.com R&D folks. We were all working together to build something that we think is very meaningful and exciting for non-profits. I'd like to thank Lauren Ingram and John Kucera from Salesforce.com R&D, Steve Wright from Salesforce.com Foundation and Tanya Keen from Google Earth Outreach for their work on this over the past few months.

Tanya describes the idea behind the program: Since the early days of Google Earth Outreach, non-profits have been asking us if there was an easy way to put all of their partners, volunteers, donors, etc. onto a map. We found out that nonprofits had been asking the same of the folks at the Salesforce.com Foundation, so we got together to make it happen.

Anyway, on to the app. It's basically a clever mash-up of the new Google Earth browser plug-in and Geocoding APIs that maps and displays the location of objects in your salesforce.com org in Earth. Here is a video that gives you a preview of how the app works:



Requirements
When designing the app, we wanted to allow mapping to happen for accounts and non account objects like the opportunities or custom objects found in the Salesforce CRM application. This requirement led us to a design custom object to hold location information. This object can then be linked to any object in the system, such as an opportunity to assist a village in Africa, or the location of a well in Spain. We called this a Geo Location object. Within the app you can manually specify the location information or the app can lookup and store that for you.

The Application
The application has the standard Account and Opportunity objects found in the Force.com Platform, and we created a custom object in Force.com to hold the location information that we will need to display the map markers on the Google Earth Browser plugin. This location object also holds the information that we would like to display in the popup balloon. The balloon is end user configurable using a pick list, which is actually another custom field. On the Force.com platform two objects can be linked or related using a lookup field. In the simplest case the custom object has lookup field that relates to the original account that holds the address.

The application also has a geocoding feature that will perform a pass across all the account addresses in your system and create the location objects. This uses the AJAX libraries provided by Google to generate the geocode locations and then uses the Force.com Visualforce AJAX features to store them into the Location objects. After this process is complete you are ready to customize your balloon templates. I included the 5 basic templates from the Google Earth Outreach "Building Better Balloons" tutorial, since these were well thought out and covered the most common configurations.

The design goal behind building a configuration object is so that the non-profit organizations that install and use this application will have a tremendous customization ability, yet not have to do any programing to achieve it. Here is a snap of the Location object detail page where users can customize the balloon that will appear when a location is clicked. As you can see it's quite easy for a non programer to set the template, photo, caption and description information. These fields make up the custom object Geo_Location.

The Code
The code that generates the map is the most interesting part for me, what we have done is to build a KML string from all the information in the system (that the user would like to map) and then pass this KML string into the Google Earth Map API. Here is a look at the Javascript that we use to map the objects, quite easy actually.


You will notice that I am using a tag in the middle of a javascript block, this tag <apex:outputText is actually a Visualforce markup tag, and is replaced on the server by the KML that my Apex Code generates. Apex is our server side coding language, more info about Apex Code can be found on the found on the Salesforce developer website.

The KML is generated on the server and placed in the page so that parseKml() has all the information it needs, including the balloons, when the page is generated and sent to the browser. This avoids any round trips between the browser and salesforce.com's service.

This is a relatively simple app to build, so we added another feature to make it a bit more useful. We offer a button to export the KML for use with Google Earth client app. This uses the same code that generates the KML for the in browser page, so adding this feature was as easy as building a new button in Salesforce CRM. If you've never customized Salesforce CRM, I often describe this process as "clicks, not code". In the setup area you step into a short wizard to specify the label for the button, the location on the page and the action that it will perform. The Action can be a URL, Javascript or Visualforce as needed.

We are releasing this app to pilot customers the week of April 27, so if you are a non-profit or you know of a non-profit organization that could use an application like this, please visit our contact page and sign up for the pilot.

Come by and see us at Google I/O May 27-28 where salesforce.com will be speaking on several topics including Open Social, Google Visualization and Google App Engine.

By Ron Hess, Developer Evangelist - Salesforce.com2013, By: Seo Master