Applications

FieldNotes LT: Take geo-located notes on your Android device

September 25, 2012

Nick is an environmental engineering student at UC Berkeley, and has worked with a professor there to produce an app that allows you to take geo-location based notes, attach photos, and export the notes in a nice Google Earth KMZ format. The app is very simple and works well.
Evernote and other note-taking apps offer some geolocation features, but it is difficult to get those notes into Google Earth. With this app, it’s quite easy to write a note, snap a photo, and email the KMZ to anyone you’d like.
Here’s the result of one I just did:

While the app is simple and works well, there were a few oddities:
1 – When I saved it, I had a few choices on what to do with the KMZ file (email, etc), but “View it in Google Earth on Android” wasn’t one of them. That may be more of an issue with my setup than with the app, but it was surprising since the latest version of Google Earth on Android supports KML files.
2 – The photo shows up sideways in Google Earth.
3 – I had to take a new photo; couldn’t select one from my gallery instead.
4 – The pin is on my current location, and is accurate, but would be nice to choose an alternate location.
In any case, it’s a handy little app for $0.99, and could be very useful for some people depending on what they need to accomplish. You can find it on Google Play here. No word on an iOS version, but time will tell.

Creating a New Life with Google Earth

August 17, 2012

Earlier this week we talked about variety of uses for Google Earth in the classroom, and Donald emailed us with another one — “A New Life“, by Classroom Copilot.

Using Google Earth, you create a new island on earth, design a flag, elect a government, develop laws, and even create a new town. They’ve created quite a few tutorial videos on how to work with the software, such as this video to help you get started:

Classroom Copilot has a variety of other games and tools, such as a phonics-based Guitar Hero clone and a tool that uses 3D paper for some cool effects.
For classrooms that create imaginary worlds in an effort to show how all aspects of a society come together, A New Life would be a great addition to the class. Learn more and try it for yourself here.

Meograph opens to all users

July 23, 2012

We first told you about the excellent Meograph tool back in May when they opened for limited beta testing. It is a tool for creating “four dimensional story-telling” with remarkable potential, and it’s been steadily improving since then. Think of it as multi-media visualizations on top of Google Earth.

Today, they’ve added a few more features and opened the door for everyone to join. The new features include:
• Full authoring capabilities: Easily create your own meograph, by simply providing facts, links, and media.
• Widely sharable: Embed your meograph on other sites, plus easily share on social networks.
• Earth/Maps toggle: Switch between mapping platforms for better performance on different devices.
• Publish on/off: Keep your work private while in progress before sharing it with your friends.
It’s a very well-produced tool, and I expect it’ll find great use as a storytelling tool. Go try it for yourself at meograph.com and leave a comment sharing your best meographs for all of us to see.

Sharing your favorite locations in Google Earth

April 23, 2012

So you’re cruising around Google Earth and you find something really cool that you want to share. How do you do it? Here are a few ways:
Save a KML file
This technique is as old as Google Earth, and still quite popular today. Add a placemark to the map, right-click on it in the “Places” menu on the left, and choose “Save Place As”. The resulting KML or KMZ file can be sent to anyone and they can quickly view that location in Google Earth on their computer. You can also submit it to places like the Google Earth Community or Google Earth Hacks to show it off to a wider audience.
Use the “Share” options
Google Earth 6.2 made it easier to share items directly from Google Earth by simply clicking the “Share” option in the upper-right corner.

• Share screenshot on Google+: This is a nice feature, but disappointing that it only shares a screenshot. We’re hoping in the future that it’ll include a linked KML file so that your friends on Google+ can quickly visit that site in Google Earth.
• Email Image: Quickly grab an screenshot and email to a friend. You can also quickly save a screenshot by going to [File] -> [Save] -> [Save Image]
• Email View: Similar to the previous option, but this generates a KML file and sends that to your friend.
Use a site like EarthURL.org
With EarthURL.org, you can use the Google Earth Plug-in to browse around the globe and quickly share locations with your friends. What’s very creative about this site is that the page URL changes in real-time while you’re browsing around. At any point, you can stop moving the globe and send the link to your friend and they’ll immediately arrive at that same location. They also have quick “copy” and “Tweet” links at the bottom of the page. I had created a similar tool called ShareIt back in 2008, but EarthURL is a much better implementation of that idea.

These are just a few of the ways to share locations from Google Earth to your friends. What is your favorite site or technique to use?

Where 2012 – Day One

April 3, 2012

My day began by going to the Getting Started with the Google Maps API presentation from Kathryn Hurley and Andres Ferrate. While I’ve certainly used the Maps API quite a bit over the years, a refresher is always a good idea. They’ve created an excellent Code Tutor to walk through the basics of their presentation. If you’d like to learn more about using the Maps API, that’s a great place to start.
Next was Building Imaginary Worlds: SketchUp and Custom Street View from Mano Marks and Adam Hecht. It was a neat combination of those two tools, showing how to create a building with SketchUp and then add the model to a custom Street View to easily allow other people to view it. Mano has created a custom Ruby script (which he’ll be releasing later) to quickly capture 8 images of his model in SketchUp, stitches them into a panorama with Hugin, then adds them to a custom Street View via the Google Maps API. It’s pretty slick.
After lunch I went to see Sean Maday (Google) and Deke Young (GeoEye) and their presentation on Leveraging Google’s Consumer Mapping Platform in the Enterprise. He spent a good deal of time showing off the features available in Google Earth Builder, a powerful business tool. A good demo sample that he showed off was from gis.frederick-county.org. Another good example was from when they shot imagery at Utah State University via a small blimp, then processed it via Google Earth Builder. You can view that imagery at sigacts.com/USU.
Sean also dropped another fun stat on us — during Christmas Eve 2011, the NORAD Santa Tracker peaked at over 1.6 million queries/second. Wow!
There were quite a few other sessions during the day, but those were some of the highlights. I’m heading out for day two and I’ll fill you in on all of that tomorrow. You’ll be able to live stream of the keynotes today, so be sure to check that out.