O’Reilly’s Where Conference is April 2-4. It’s going to be a great conference, with lots of really interesting talks on mapping and location technologies. And Google is going to have a big presence. We’ll have 5 workshops, 4 sessions, and one keynote by Google Vice President Brian McClendon. This is the biggest effort we’ve ever done. We’ll be talking about a variety of topics, including:

• Google Earth
• Getting Started with the Google Maps API
• Using HTML5 in your maps applications
• SketchUp and Street View
• Mapping with Google+
• and much more

So if you’re headed to Where, come and say hello at our sessions or at our booth in the exhibit hall.

If you haven’t registered for Where yet, you can get 25% off by using this discount code: GOOG25. So register today while there’s still space.

Posted by Mano Marks, Maps Developer Relations Team

KML Balloons in Google Earth - starting with version 5.0 - support HTML, CSS, and almost full JavaScript. This can be a great tool for developers looking to add rich content and interactivity into their KML files.

However, it’s not always obvious how to debug that KML content. Google Earth doesn’t have a full set of tools like Chrome Developer Tools. However, it does allow you to view console output, so console.log() output, as well as errors that would normally appear in the Chrome console or Firebug will appear in the console instead. Note, Google Earth does not allow the presentation of system dialogs (namely the functions alert, confirm, and prompt).

Here’s some quick tips on how to get it to work:

• Linux: Launch Google Earth from the terminal window. Console output will then appear in the terminal window.
• Mac OS X: You can launch it directly from the command line, “/Applications/Google Earth.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Earth” and read the console output in the command line.
• Windows: Install DebugView, which is from Microsoft, and look for system messages in the output.

Here's a screenshot from Mac OS X:

Balloon content is rendered by WebKit, and Google Earth currently supports the equivalent of Safari 4.0.4 (which is WebKit-based). If you want to know if a particular JavaScript or CSS feature is supported, one option is to search for it on http://caniuse.com/.

Posted by Mano Marks, Maps API Developer Relations Team

Back in December of 2009, five leading scientists from the American Geophysical Union trekked to the remote Google office in downtown San Francisco. Lost until now, the video of their presentations have resurfaced. So, for the first time ever, we present, the Lost Archives of the Google Geo Developers Series

Jeffrey Cardille of Universitie de Montreal discusses GeoSearch, a new virtual globe application for the submission, storage, and sharing of point-based ecological data.

Thijs Damsma of Deltares discusses his use of KML to visualize coastal data.

Ross Beyer of NASA and SETI discusses his work visualizing Mars data and imagery using Google Earth.

Tyler Erickson of Michigan Tech Research Institute discusses his tools for to visualizing 4-D atmospheric carbon monitoring data using KML and Google Earth

Yaxing Wei of Oak Ridge National Lab discusses his Spatial Data Access Tool which enables visualization and access of geospatial data using OGC services and Google Earth.

Posted by Mano Marks, Geo APIs team

From the earliest days of Google Earth, (and even back when it was still called Keyhole,) developers have wanted control over the globe to create their own 3D Earth applications. In response to this need, the Keyhole team added a COM API to the Keyhole app, to allow further customization of users’ Google Earth experience. When Keyhole became Google Earth in 2005, this API was carried over. Though we never provided much support, developers discovered the COM bindings and a few intrepid developers sorted through the vagaries of COM programming. Eventually we had a small but committed development community demanding documentation, which we released in 2007. We saw some interesting uses for the COM API, particularly by Enterprise users and broadcasters. Mostly, though, people wanted to put Earth in their web applications.

In 2008, we released the Google Earth API and browser plug-in. This robust JavaScript API is more powerful than the COM API, and can be used on a variety of platforms to deliver compelling 3D applications over the web based on the Google Earth technology. At the same time, we stopped development on the COM API and began encouraging developers to migrate to the Earth API instead. Today, more and more apps are being written in JavaScript, and COM itself is no longer a widely used technology, so the time has come to retire the Google Earth COM API.

Today we’re announcing that the Google Earth 5.2 client will be the last version that supports the COM API. Earth 5.2 and older clients will continue to support the COM API while these versions are supported. Future releases will no longer have COM API bindings. We believe that the JavaScript API provides the best mechanism for reaching the most developers.

We realize that a few of you will be disappointed by this news, however we are happy to work with you to transition off of COM onto JavaScript. Please see the documentation for more information on how to work with the Earth API, and visit our active developer forum for support. Enterprise customers can also contact Enterprise support with any questions. If you have a feature from COM that you can’t live without, please let us know about it by adding it as a feature request in our issue tracker, and starring other requests.

Posted by Mano Marks, Geo APIs Team

Posted by Mano Marks, Geo APIs Team

March 5th, from 3-9pm, Google will be hosting a Google Geo APIs hackathon at our Manhattan offices, 111 8th Avenue at 15th street in Manhattan. Join us for some hacking around on Google Geo APIs. Work on our learning materials, or work on your own projects. There will presentations on new features in the APIs, and plenty of Geo Googlers around to help you with your technical questions. In particular, we will be helping people with the Google Maps API, the Google Earth API, and KML.

To register, click here. Space is limited, so you may want to register now.

Posted by Mano Marks, Geo APIs team

You've probably already read about this week's release of Google Earth 5.0 and its exciting new features, including Historical Imagery, Touring, Ocean, and Mars. As is usually the case for new features in Earth, we wanted to add representations for some of them to KML. In the past this was done by simply adding new elements to the KML specification. But that's no longer an option for us, since KML is no longer controlled by Google, having been released as an open standard by the Open Geospatial Consortium.

So what's an application provider to do? Fortunately, both Google and the OGC had the foresight to anticipate that innovation would continue to drive the standard forward, so OGC KML includes a standardized mechanism that enables any group to extend KML within their own XML namespace. Google Earth 5.0 uses this extension mechanism to add to KML in a standards-compliant way. We've also added some new documentation to guide you in understanding these new KML constructs:

• First, something mentioned no where else, Google Earth now supports close to the full range of HTML and JavaScript in the description balloon! This is something that developers have been asking for, and we were able to change the HTML rendering engine to include it. For more details, check out the KML Reference for the description element.
• We added a new Developer Guide article on Touring. The KML representation of touring is much more expressive than the simple record button in Google Earth -- KML tour authors have very precise control over the camera, the time slider, and even 3D object animation.
• We added another Developer Guide article on altitudeMode, which explains among other things the new ability to place Features below the water surface.
• We've updated the Time and Animation article to take into account touring and time machine. In particular, KML authors can now control the time slider, both inside and outside of a tour.
• We updated our KML reference to include entries on all the of the new extension elements. The new elements are carefully called out in the documentation as being part of Google's KML extension namespace, to distinguish them from the core OGC KML elements.
• And finally, we updated libkml to version 0.9. libkml is a powerful open source library for use with applications that want to parse, generate and operate on KML. The new version provides support for the extensions, as well as Update/Delete.

For those who are interested in precise XML validation of the new elements, please see Google's new KML 2.2 extensions XSD, which is the formal standards-compliant description of their syntax.

As always, you can find out more information or ask questions in the KML Developer Forum.

Posted by Mano Marks, Geo APIs team

OK, it's not exactly a manual, actually a handbook, The KML Handbook by Josie Wernecke. Josie is the Google tech writer who wrote the KML 2.1 and 2.2 documentation, and also helped write the KML 2.2 OGC Specification. So she knows what she's talking about!

The KML Handbook is the most complete treatment of KML in print. It explains all the various elements and features of KML. It also examines both well known topics like Regionation, and lesser known topics like View Based Refresh. It is also the only book on KML officially endorsed by Google.

The book is available for pre-sale from Amazon and O'Reilly, and should be available for immediate purchase soon. So for all those would-be Santa Trackers, and anyone else in the geographic world, you now have a great holiday gift.

Posted by Mano Marks, Geo APIs team
Last Friday in the Madrid Google Office, a group of 22 outside developers, and 4 Googlers, met to discuss current projects, and to give feedback to Google about Google Geo APIs. There were too many presentations to list all of them here, but here are some highlights:

• Developers from ipoki, Wolpy, and Wikiloc talked about the different ways they implement GPS track uploads and sharing of geo content.
• Javier de la Torre presented about using heatmaps to display biodiversity data.
• A developer from Paintmap presented about their site, which allows artists to sell paintings that are contextually placed by their their subject matter. They also use the Panoramio API to allow you to compare thumbnails of the paintings with photos taken at those locations.
• A developer from Placechannel talked about his site's use of geolocated YouTube videos, and allowing users to make edits to the locations, stored only on their site.
• Googlers presented about the improvements to Panoramio's performance, the new Spanish language Google Maps API Documentation, and the Earth API.

We got a lot of great suggestions for various APIs at Google, including all the Geo APIs, but also the YouTube API and SketchUp. We had so much fun that we went over by two hours, but no one seemed to mind. Gracias desarrolladores de España, es un gran día!

Posted by Mano Marks, Geo APIs Team Last Monday, 15 of us met in the Google Victoria offices for the first London Google Geo Developer Meet-up. The primary goal was to allow people to meet each other, and we certainly achieved that. A good time was had by all. In addition, we had some brief presentations:

• Tina Ornduff talked about Google Earth Education and her recent talks with educators in the UK. Some of the projects include Digital Geography, Google Lit Trips, and Real World Math
• Marc Tobias Metten gave an excellent presentation on how Nestoria uses Google Maps in their real estate site. It was interesting to hear not just about the map, but the difficulties in working with multiple data providers.
• The ex-historian in me was intrigued by Phil Gyford's presentation on Pepys' Diary, his site tracking the diary of Samuel Pepys, a 17th century resident of London. Every day, Phil blogs a day of Pepys' diary, and includes links to resources about the various figures and locations in the diary, as well as providing maps of his daily activities.
• I presented about the new Google Earth API, and showed some of the example projects.

Afterwards, we went to the The Phoenix for drinks and food. Here's a couple of photos:

Posted by Mano Marks, Geo APIs Team

Google Developer Day London is coming up, and I'm pretty excited. I'm coming to London for it. I'm coming to London and we're holding a meetup for geo developers on Monday, September 15th, at 4:00pm in the Google London office. We'll gather together for a couple of presentations and question and answers. Then we'll spend some time getting to know each other at a local pub.

Space is limited, so if you're coming, please let us know you're coming.