Google has a cool Chrome extension called Earth View, which replaces the new tab page with a stunning satellite image from Google Earth. The latest release brings a lot of new features: there are 500 new images, you can see the images from the last 10 tabs you've opened, there's a download feature in the menu and a sharing button. You can share images on Google+, Facebook, Twitter or copy the URL and paste it somewhere else.
How to see the images from the last 10 tabs you've opened? Just mouse over the bottom of the new tab page and click "recent imagery". You should see a list of 10 clickable thumbnails.
If you don't want to install the extension or you use a different browser, there's a web gallery that shows all the 1500 images. Click the arrow button or use the left/right keyboard shortcuts to navigate between images. There's also a slideshow feature called "leanback mode".
"Earth View is a collection of the most striking and enigmatic landscapes available in Google Earth. The colors, shapes, textures and patterns all contribute to the strange beauty of our planet, reminding us of nature’s uncanny geometry and bewildering simplicity. Each of the 1500 images featured in this collection was hand curated and available for download as wallpaper for your desktop or mobile," informs Google.
Google Earth celebrates its 10th birthday and the desktop software adds a new layer called Voyager, which integrates Earth View, Street View highlights, 3D cities, a map of recently published satellite images and a tour that shows a few of the thousands of Voyager locations to choose from.
Google Earth Pro has a lot of advanced features that aren't available in the regular Google Earth:
* premium data layers for the US: demographic, parcel and traffic
* advanced GIS data importing features
* measure area, radius and circumference on the ground
* print high-resolution screenshot
* movie maker: record and save 3D imagery
* no more ads
"Over the last 10 years, businesses, scientists and hobbyists from all over the world have been using Google Earth Pro for everything from planning hikes to placing solar panels on rooftops. Google Earth Pro has all the easy-to-use features and detailed imagery of Google Earth, along with advanced tools that help you measure 3D buildings, print high-resolution images for presentations or reports, and record HD movies of your virtual flights around the world," informs Google.
Google has a new experimental service that lets you build Google Earth tours from your browser. It's called Tour Builder and it requires the Google Earth Plugin (you also get the plugin when you install Google Earth).
"Tour Builder is a new way to show people the places you've visited and the experiences you had along the way using Google Earth. It lets you pick the locations right on the map, add in photos, text, and video, and then share your creation. We originally created Tour Builder to give veterans a way to record all the places that military service has taken them, and preserve their stories and memories as a legacy for their families. But we also thought it could be a useful tool for anyone with a story to tell, so we made it available to everyone," explains Google.
Before creating a tour, you can check the gallery:
Tour Builder lets you add images and videos, import KML files, enable or disable some layers, add historical imagery. By default, tours are private, but you can share them with other people.
It's rare to hear that a Google service or app is out of beta, but this used to happen very often a few years ago. Chrome for Android was launched in February and it came with an innovative interface, a great way to manage tabs and a feature that keeps all your bookmarks, visited pages and passwords in sync with the desktop Chrome.
Now Chrome for Android is out of beta, which means that it should be more stable and more reliable. For some reason, the Chrome mobile app is not in sync with the desktop app, so the latest stable version is 18.0.1025.166, which corresponds to the desktop versions from April.
I've been using this browser since March, when I was able to install Android 4.0 on my Galaxy S2 (Chrome requires Android 4.0). It's really fast, the deck-of-cards interface is intuitive, you can open as many tabs as you want and the browser saves the list of tabs and even the part of the page where you stopped reading. Other than the lack of Flash support, my main complaints are that Chrome for Android uses a lot of resources (internal storage, RAM, battery) and there's an annoying gesture that conflicts with horizontal scrolling. You can "swipe from the right edge of the screen to the left to go to the next tab in the list," but the same gesture can also be used for scrolling.
Chrome for Android is the default browser for the Nexus 7 tablet and probably all the future Nexus devices will include it. Chrome replaces the old "Browser" app and the most important thing is that Chrome will constantly be updated, since it's a regular app from Google Play.
It will be interesting to see if Android OEMs will bundle the Chrome app or continue to develop their own browsers. Even if your new Android phone or tablet will have a different browser, you can always install Chrome from Google Play. Unlike iOS, Android lets you set a default browser and you can even disable the bundled browser.
You can call them flyover maps, 45-degree aerial images or 3D maps. In an effort to show that its mapping software is still cutting-edge, Google updated the Google Earth app for Android and added new 3D imagery for many cities (mostly in the US): Boulder, Boston, Santa Cruz, San Diego, Los Angeles, Long Beach, San Antonio, Charlotte, Tucson, Lawrence, Portland, Tampa, Rome and the San Francisco Bay Area. A similar feature is available in Apple's new maps app for iOS 6.
"Using 45-degree aerial imagery, we're able to automatically recreate entire metropolitan areas in 3D. This means every building (not just the famous landmarks), the terrain, and any surrounding landscape of trees are included to provide a much more accurate and realistic experience. (...) We'll continue to release new 3D imagery for places around the world over the coming months; by the end of the year, we aim to have new 3D coverage for metropolitan areas with a combined population of 300 million people," explains Google.
The new features is available in Google Earth 7.0 for Android and it requires a device with a dual-core CPU. An updated app for iOS will be released soon.
Google Earth 6 doesn't have too many new features. You can now use Street View just like in Google Maps by dragging the pegman icon. "To view street-level imagery for a specific location, zoom into an area at an altitude of approximately 500km. You will see a pegman icon appear at the top right below the navigation controls. Click and drag the icon across the 3D viewer. A blue border will appear around roads that have street-level imagery available," explains Google.
Another new feature is the "3D Trees" layer that can be enabled from the "3D Buildings" section. Google Earth includes 3D models for city parks (San Francisco, Chicago, Tokio, Athens) and remote forests (Amazon Forest).
Historical imagery is now more accessible: just click on the date of the oldest imagery in the status bar and you'll be able to see all the historical images that are available for the same location.
Google Earth 6 also adds ground-level navigation that lets you explore 3D buildings and 3D trees, 3D measurements for heights and widths of buildings and a much better Tour Recorder that improves motion fidelity.
Google Earth 5.2 no longer uses the operating system's web browser when you click on links. Google Earth comes with a WebKit-based browser, so you'll never have to leave the application to open a Wikipedia page or the website of a local business.
"Sometimes when you want more information, you may want to click through to a link to see the full Google Places page for a business, or learn more about a photographer whose photo you really enjoy. In the past, this has required opening a link in an external browser to see the full page. For Google Earth 5.2, we've added an embedded browser that lets you browse the full web. Click on a link, and the browser pane slides across the screen. When you want to return to the Earth view, just click the Back button," explains Google.
Apparently, Google Earth uses the Qt port of WebKit (QtWebKit) and it doesn't include the V8 Javascript engine from Google Chrome. I tried to run the V8 benchmark suite in Google Earth and the result was very poor: about 10 times lower than the latest Chromium build.
As in the previous versions, Google Earth for Windows and Mac also includes a plug-in that lets you embed a Google Earth view in any web page. Google Maps is the most popular service that lets you use Google Earth in your browser. Now you can browse the Web in Google Earth and use Google Earth in a Web browser.
If you don't like the embedded browser, you can disable it by going to Tools > Options > General and checking "Show web results in external browser".
Google Maps replaced the terrain tab with a tab for Google Earth. When you click on the Earth tab, Google asks you to install a plug-in for Windows or Mac. If you have a recent version of Google Earth, you already have the plug-in.
"Five years ago, shortly after Google's acquisition of Keyhole, we introduced the first integration of Keyhole technology into Google Maps -- Satellite view. Suddenly, you could see what places actually looked like from the air, and easily switch between this view and the map view. Mapping has never been the same. A few months later, the desktop Google Earth application was released, and now we have over 600 million downloads. Today we are proud to announce the next major step in the marriage between Google Earth and Google Maps -- Earth view," says Peter Birch, from Google.
Even though the new view makes it easier to use Google Earth, since you no longer have to open a new application, I think it's a bad idea to add it to Google Maps. Google Earth plug-in uses a lot of resources, it slows down your browser and it continues to run in the background even if you switch to the Map tab. What's more, if you open Google Maps in another window and switch to the Earth tab, a new instance of the Google Earth plug-in will load.
Downloading Google Earth is more complicated than it should be. At least if you want to download only Google Earth and save the installer for a future use. By default, Google downloads a small setup file that installs Google Earth, Google Chrome and Google Updater. Even if you disable the option "Include Google Chrome, a fast new browser for Windows and Mac", you'll still download a Web installer.
Here's how to download the standalone installer for Google Earth:
The advanced setup page offers two other interesting options: installing Google Earth for all user accounts and the full setup for Google Earth 5.0.
Google Chrome should add a similar page that lets you download the standalone installer and a version that installs the software for all user accounts. This page still offers the standalone setup, but it's an old version. Right now, Google Pack is the only option to install Chrome for multiple user accounts.
Google's 3D Earth browser has been updated and the latest build, 5.1.3506.3999, loads faster and it's snappier.
"We've made a lot of adjustments under the hood, like improving memory utilization so we can show more buildings, layers, and user content. We improved our shaders (that's graphics-speak for small programs that run inside your graphics processor) to make the atmosphere draw faster. We also worked to reduce stuttering (known as frame drops) to provide an even smoother experience as you fly around the globe. When we draw imagery, we now use compression technology to use less memory and graphics resources. We know that waiting for a program to start-up can be really frustrating, so we improved our start-up time by 25%," mentions Google LatLong blog.
While the performance improvement is noticeable, Google Earth continues to use a lot of resources. In a small empirical test, I compared the latest release with an earlier version and the results are even better than Google's claims:
Google Earth version
Start-up time
Memory usage when searching for "Paris"
Google Earth 5.0.11337.1968
11.5 seconds
183 MB
Google Earth 5.0.11733.9347
10.4 seconds
164 MB
Google Earth 5.1.3506.3999
6.9 seconds
145 MB
Update: If you want to download Google Earth without installing Google Updater, here's the direct download link for Windows. This build includes the plug-in for IE/Firefox/Chrome that lets you use Google Earth inside a browser. That means you'll end up with three different Google Earth versions when you upgrade: the old version, which for some reason is not removed, the new version of Google Earth and the plug-in, which wastes 33 MB by including separate copies of the files used by Google Earth.
After adding the ocean, the sky, Mars, Google Earth now has imagery from the Moon. Forty years after the Moon landing, you can explore the Earth's natural satellite in 3D.
"Each of the Apollo landing missions is chronicled in detail through pictures and stories. We've even embedded video footage from Spacecraft Films that covers the most well-known moments on the surface. There are also immersive lunar surface panoramas, composed of photos taken by the astronauts themselves, presented for the first time in a 3D Street View style interface," explains Google.
To see the Moon, you need a recent version of Google Earth: after installing the software, click on the planet button from the toolbar and select "Moon".
Disneyland Paris is the first amusement park available in Google Street View. "Last October, as the last few rays of sunlight remained high enough in the sky, Disneyland Paris opened its gates early to our Street View car to capture some of the magic at street-level. We drove up Main Street USA (outside of Paris!), through Adventureland, and around Fantasyland and even in Walt Disney Studios Park," explains Google.
This shows some important uses of Google Street View: helping tourists plan itineraries and conducting virtual field trips.
You can also view an impressive 3D model of Disneyland Paris in Google Earth. "More than 85,000 photos (450GB worth) were taken over a 20 day period for this project. The castle alone is comprised of over 354 textures derived from over 2,000 photos. (...) There are over 500 unique landscape elements that were created to make the park look as realistic as possible."
The unofficial Google Earth blog reports that Google added a lot of new 3D buildings. "Google has been slowly adding cities using an unpublished methodology where vast numbers of buildings for large areas of cities are being rendered in 3D with photorealistic textures. The photos appear to be aerial in some cases, in others they seem to be from the ground. But, they are using an at least semi-automated process judging from the cases where some buildings are not properly dressed with the photo textures."
Open the latest version of Google Earth, switch to "Mars" and search for "Meliza". Click on the small robotic icon and you'll be able to chat with Meliza, a friendly relative of Eliza, one of the first chat bots. A message informs Earthlings that "Meliza is using an account on a different planet. There may be translation errors." The chat bot has some predefined text related to Mars and it can't answer to many questions, but it's always ready to rephrase your messages.
Here's Meliza's first message: "Greetings, Earthling! What do you think of Google Mars?Have you checked out Valles Marineris? It's like the Grand Canyon, but bigger. Mars is so much better than Earth!"
In other news, Google and NASA sponsor Singularity University. "In 2005, futurist Ray Kurzweil published The Singularity Is Near, a comfort-rattling forecast of a few decades hence when artificial intelligence will overtake human capability and an array of other huge leaps will fundamentally alter our lives. Now, Kurzweil is helping to launch a university rooted in the book's predictions. In June, Singularity University is scheduled to open with a faculty replete with scientific celebrities, and an initial class of 30 students at NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley."
Google Earth 5, the latest version of Google's 3D geo-browser, brings an important feature from the discontinued Google Earth Plus, which used to cost $20/year. You can now read tracks and waypoints from a GPS device like Magellan and Garmin and you can import GPS files in GPX and LOC format.
Another interesting new feature is the ability to visualize geographical changes over time. Google Earth shows historical imagery that goes back to the 40s in some places like San Francisco.
If you find an interesting way to visualize a location, there's a new "record a tour" option that saves the places you visit in Google Earth and lets you replay the tour. Unfortunately, you can't export a tour in a video format using the free version of Google Earth, but the good news is that you can record a voice commentary.
Google Earth is no longer just about the Earth and stars, now you can use it to view imagery and terrain of Mars by clicking on the planet icon.
While all these additions useful, you'll most likely download Google Earth 5 to explore the ocean. "Dive beneath the surface and visit the deepest part of the ocean, the Mariana Trench. Explore the ocean with top marine experts including National Geographic and BBC. Learn about ocean observations, climate change, and endangered species. Discover new places including surf, dive, and travel hot spots and shipwrecks."
Google Earth 5 for Windows, Linux and Mac can be downloaded from earth.google.com. The Windows version is not download directly: you first install Google Update, which downloads the setup and then installs the application. For those who can't use Google Update, here's a direct link to the Windows client.
Tip: Before installing Google Earth, read the user guide.
The first desktop application ported by Google to a mobile phone is Google Earth. iPhone and iPod Touch users can download for free from the App Store the best way to explore satellite imagery in 3D.
"Not only is having Google Earth on your iPhone convenient, but the touch interface is a very natural way to interact with the Earth. Just swipe your finger across the screen and you fly to the other side of the globe; tilt your phone and your view tilts as well. You can pinch to zoom in or out, or just double tap with one finger to zoom in and two fingers to zoom out," says Google LatLong Blog.
CNet writes that iPhone's multitouch makes the experience much more intuitive than in the desktop version of Google Earth. Like Google Maps for Mobile, the application can detect your location using information from GPS, Wi-Fi networks, and mobile phone towers. You can explore interesting places and discover more about them using the integrated layers: Wikipedia and Panoramio photos.
The cool applications that were only available from your computer start to be ported to mobile phones. In the future, the most exciting applications will be first launched for mobile phones.
Google Earth can now be used from a browser, without having to install the full application. Instead of the application, you need to install a plug-in that only works in Firefox and Internet Explorer 6/7 on Windows.
Google also launched an JavaScript API that lets you interact with the globe, draw markers, add layers or integrate with Google Maps. "The Google Earth Plug-in and its APIs let you embed the full power of Google Earth and its 3D rendering capabilities into your web pages." Google LatLong blog announced that each Google Maps mashup can take advantage of the new 3D view by adding a single line of code. "Our goal is to open up the entire core of Google Earth to developers in the hopes that you'll build the next great geo-based 3D application, and change how we view the world."
The samples look pretty promising, but I find it hard to understand why Google didn't use the API to create a better experience and bring more features from Google Earth (the search box, the list of overlays, the navigation controls) in a single interface.
Before downloading the plugin, please note that Google installs it in Firefox and Internet Explorer, along with a system service called "Google Update Service". The plug-in uses a lot of memory (around 100 MB just for loading the initial view and 300 MB for the Monster Milktruck demo) and, for each embedded object, you're running an instance of the Google Earth application.
There's a new layer for Google Earth that shows Google News stories related to a location. At the recent "Factory Tour of Search" event, Google explained the difficulties of automatically identifying the locations of a news story. For example, just because a news article includes "Paris" doesn't mean that the article talks about France's capital. It could be about the Texas city or Paris Hilton, so the algorithm needs to disambiguate names, identify complete addresses and determine the importance of an alleged location in a text. Google News also uses its automatically-generated clusters to validate locations and their importance to a news story.
"The launch of Google News on Google Earth is a milestone in the evolution of the geobrowser. By spatially locating the Google News' constantly updating index of stories from more than 4,500 news sources, Google Earth now shows an ever-changing world of human activity as chronicled by reporters worldwide. Zoom into areas of personal interest and peruse headlines of national, regional and, when fully zoomed in, even the most local of interest," says Brandon Badger, Product Manager of Google's Geo team.
To enable the Google Earth layer, go to the Layers sidebar, expand "Gallery" and select "Google News" from the impressive list of overlays. Another news-related layer that has been recently added to Google Earth is for New York Times, but it's likely that the news are geo-coded manually.
If you want to read news related to a location in your browser, add a local section to the personalized Google News homepage. "Adding a Local News section allows you to track news stories from and about a particular city or region. While this function is currently only available in our English language editions, we hope to add more languages and regions in the near future," explains the Google News help center.
The latest version of Google Earth brings a lot of interface changes and new features. There's a redesigned and improved navigation control that lets you change the perspective much faster. Here's the description from Google Earth's help center:
"1. Click the north up button to reset the view so that north is at the top of the screen. Click and drag the ring to rotate your view. 2. Use the Look joystick to look around from a single vantage point, as if you were turning your head. Click an arrow to look in that direction or continue to press down on the mouse button to change your view. After clicking an arrow, move the mouse around on the joystick to change the direction of motion. 3. Use the Move joystick to move your position from one place to another. Click an arrow to look in that direction or continue to press down on the mouse button to change your view. After clicking an arrow, move the mouse around on the joystick to change the direction of motion. 4. Use the zoom slider to zoom in or out (+ to zoom in, - to zoom out) or click the icons at the end of the slider. As you move closer to the ground, Google Earth swoops (tilts) to change your viewing angle to be parallel to the Earth's surface. You can turn off this automatic tilt (Tools > Options > Navigation > Navigation controls; Mac: Google Earth > Preferences > Navigation > Navigation controls)."
You can now display the sun by enabling View > Sun or clicking on the sun button from the toolbar. To create time-lapse views of sunsets and sunrises, click on the "play" button and watch the changes.
For some of the imagery, you can see at the bottom of the window an approximation of the date when it was taken. The Street View images from Google Maps are now available in a new Google Earth layer, which is not enabled by default.
Google Earth includes much more models in the 3D buildings layer for cities like: San Francisco, Boston, Orlando, Munich, Zurich. "Google has optimized the loading and performance of 3D buildings. When you first turn on the 3D Buildings layer near a city with models, you'll see simplistic versions of the buildings load up really fast, then they gradually get more solid and load more texture detail," explains the unofficial Google Earth Blog.
Google Earth 4.3 can be downloaded from earth.google.com. Windows users that don't want to install the application using Google Updater can try this direct link. You'll probably notice that the Windows setup is much smaller: the size has been reduced from 12.7 MB to 7.36 MB. Unfortunately, the new version seems to be less stable and it uses more resources, but it's still in beta.
Google Earth added a very interesting layer that shows news from the New York Times that mention a certain place. Search for an address and you should see some small New York Times logos that hide previews from recent news articles.
Google LatLong Blog mentions that the layer is updated every 15 minutes, so it's probably the most up-to-date layer from Google Earth. "The New York Times offers geo-coded news, and Google Earth offers the platform for reading that news in a 3D browser. This is the first time we've endeavored to show news updated in real time, and we're very excited to work with this first-class publication to bring you the latest and greatest news."
It would be a great idea to port this layer to Google Maps and show the latest news from every place of the world.
Google Summer of Code Blog mentions about an application created by Pawel Solyga "that allows you to control Google Earth using two finger gestures on [a] multi-touch table". I couldn't find too many details about TouchEarth, but it's an interesting application of the mostly-unknown Google Earth COM API.
I remember that one of the demos of Android (03:54), Google's mobile platform launched in November last year, showed a touch interface for a spinning globe.
"1. Click the north up button to reset the view so that north is at the top of the screen. Click and drag the ring to rotate your view.
