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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