All posts by Stefan Geens

Content

Weekend roundup

Jeremy Bartley upgrades the functionality of his excellent Mapdex search site. He’s also found a way to increase the coverage of ArcIMS-served overlays, by requesting four adjacent images instead of one. It’s a clever hack (via Spatially Adjusted.)

Scotland’s Sunday Herald shows that those who don’t know their Google Earth history are destined to repeat it.

The Micro GPS tracking module has the exact same feature list as the KML-savvy Trackstick, blogged 2 weeks ago, but costs twice as much, at over $600. FYI.

The Register (of course) finds a 40-meter long profanity in Google Earth.

Content

Google Earth Mac… Now for OS X 10.3.9

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Google Earth for Mac has quietly been updated to 3.1.0617.0 beta, with a build date of February 9. A quick check of the release notes shows that the minimum configuration is now OS X 10.3.9, which should be good news for many Mac users.

The release notes are a trove of interesting workarounds, and are well worth the read. They will tell you how to get to password-protected content, for example, or how to associate .kml and .kmz files with Google Earth. No native Intel support yet, but the notes state that using Rosetta works fine.

Another new feature is that Microsoft Entourage is now supported as a mail client in the preferences, in addition to Apple Mail. In fact, such support was available before if you used Barry Wainwright’s hack from his Entourage User’s Weblog. Barry now writes it is his hack that made it into the latest Google Earth version, down to the same variable names, and that “It’s nice to be appreciated in this way. It would be nicer to be acknowledged as well.” (I haven’t verified this independently.) [14:20 UTC: The announcement on Google Earth Community mentions Barry’s contribution.]

(Via MacWorld, which continues its Google Earth review with a second installment, though again without focusing on network links, arguably Google Earth’s most interesting feature.)

Uncategorized

CoG calculator: Third time lucky

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The center of gravity calculator previously featured on Ogle Earth, although it worked for me on my Mac, didn’t seem to work for many others. Via helpful comments, it began to look like it might be a Mac vs. PC thing.

I can now confirm that this was indeed the case. Saving a folder with placemarks to the desktop produces KML that differs according to the operating system you’re using. The unexpected part is that it’s the Mac beta which produces the most complete KML, whereas the PC version produces something quite sparse (though well-formed) that doesn’t preserve the state of the saved placemarks. Here is the PC file, and here is the Mac file.

One difference is that the PC saves a KML file with a <Folder> element at its root, whereas the Mac uses <Document>, into which it places a <Folder>. But more importantly for debugging the calculator, the Mac version also saves <visibility> and <open> for each placemark, so that later, the folder’s state is preserved when the KML is uploaded back into Google Earth.

The calculator assumed each placemark had such a visibility tag, and calculated the center of gravity only for placemarks flagged as visible. Since the PC version contains no visibility tags, the script found 0 visible placemarks, hence the division by zero error.

I have now removed the visibility test from the calculator. All placemarks are counted, visible or not. The calculator now works for me with PC-generated files that broke previously. Do let me know if you still have problems. Once again, the center of gravity calculator.

[Update 2006-02-11 12:48 UTC: And not a minute too soon — the latest Mac version of Google Earth (3.1.0617.0 beta) no longer saves down folders with visibility tags.]

Tutorials

Free video tutorials for Google Earth neophytes

Have you talked your parents into downloading Google Earth but can’t stomach the idea of explaining over and over again which button does what and why? Briton Richard Treves comes to the rescue by posting the start of a series of 10 screencasts that step through the most basic aspects of Google Earth. The plan is to release one weekly.

Complete with sound, it’s just like watching over the shoulder of somebody very patient who repeats himself at your command. It doesn’t get much simpler than this.

Content

Golfnation.org

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In the hunt for the new in Google Earth content, here is another one that’s obvious after the fact as soon as you hear it: Google Earth-enhanced golf courses. Daniel Herring and Mickey Mellen are the guys behind golfnation.org:

Me and a friend are putting together a new site with golf course information. We’ve started in Atlanta (USA) and we’re going to slowly spread around to more cities.

There are a lot of sites that have this info, but ours has a twist – Google Earth. :) We’ve taken screenshots for every hole on the site (around 500 so far) and have a downloadable KML for each course that shows the course layout, hole information, and usually a polygon or two for the clubhouse.

golfie.jpg

They’re asking for suggestions as to how else they could improve coverage using Google Earth. As I don’t have a clue about golf, let me be bold: Sell GPS-enabled golf balls! And get Tiger’s arcing shots into Google Earth — if not live, then as a library of great games. And why not put those upcoming Volkswagen/Google Earth mini consoles in golf carts on a wifi-enabled course, so that you can check out the course as you play, or perhaps even fly along with your ball? Individual players on the course should definitely wear little GPS devices, so that course managers can better coordinate fast and slow players.

I’m guessing 3D virtual globes will need to get to the next generation before golfers can truly benefit, with a much ameliorated 3D mesh for the course, and also “real” trees. Or maybe there is money to be made today from add-on packs? Any suggestions from people who actually play?

(BTW, Mickey Mellen’s other Google Earth brainchildren? Google Earth Hacks and GEWar. And we know how those turned out…)

Content

Starbucks’ global center of gravity

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Jim Cser from Portland writes:

To follow up on your earlier Starbucks post, I got inspired and created a KML file of (almost) all the Starbucks in the world, based on data from their website. It only has the ones they map, which excludes most of Asia, but it’s still around 9,000.

He’s posted the KML file online. I obviously had to complete the circle and run Jim’s file through the center of gravity calculator. Without further ado, here is the world’s “densest” spot for Starbucks shops:

SBCoG.jpg

Perhaps unexpectedly, it’s on farmland in Northern Nebraska, 40km South of the nearest Starbucks in Yankton, South Dakota.

Given the “weight” of the 9,000 Starbucks that are mapped, the true center of gravity is unlikely to wander far from this spot if a couple of Asian stores were to be added. The precise spot is here in Tagzania.

Reviews

Ogle Earth mentioned in old media

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I don’t usually blog content behind paywalls, but if it involves a mention of Ogle Earth, I’m willing to bend the rules: The Atlantic Monthly has one of the most gushingly enthusiastic articles about Google Earth I’ve ever read, and it’s a wholly infectuous read. Staff writer James Fallows relates how his first use of Google Earth felt as momentous as the first time he saved a file, used a modem, used Mosaic or typed a word into a search engine.

Unlike some shallow reviews of Google Earth, Fallows rightly highlights the user-created content that has bloomed for Google Earth. And here comes the plug:

The easiest way to see what’s on offer is through sites like Ogleearth.com and Gearthblog.com. They have news and screenshots, and links to files that create the overlays for Google Earth.

(Perhaps that’s just a tad too self-referential, so I’ll atone by also linking to Google Earth Hacks and Google Earth Community.)

Couldn’t not fact-check The Atlantic, though. For an article published February 7 and intended for the March issue, the release of a Mac version early in January should be an event in the past, not a promise for the future.

Fallows also pushes geobloggers.com as a liaison between Google Earth and Flickr; while excellent, geobloggers is currently down, so in the meantime make do with Flickr2Map, Flyr, and Flickrmap, or try Panoramio.

And finally, ESRI’s Jack Dangermond is quoted as saying, “There’s no way to connect a professional data set to Google Earth, so in a sense it is pretty thin. […] But because it is spellbinding to customers, it can only build awareness of geography.” Maybe Dangermond has a different definition for “professional” or “connect”, but there is a wealth of data converters out there, including translators for WMS, ArcGIS (Arc2Earth), CAD applications… pretty much everything 3D and geospatial is being ported to Google Earth, not least video game characters.

Temporary link to the article here.