It’s Friday again, and it’s time for another Fab Friday post on Google Geo Developers! This week, we’ve got something for the jQuery developers out there. There’s a jQuery UI module for the Google Maps API. This enables you to quickly integrate the Maps API into your jQuery applications. They give some great examples using Street View, Geolocation, and adding data from microformats and RDFa.
In an upcoming event, I’ll be speaking at GIS in Action in Portland Oregon March 14th and 15th, anyone there please come and say hi.
Happy Valentine’s Day! Particularly if you’re Canadian!
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the Canada Kiss Map is a Google Maps API powered application that enables users to share the stories and locations of their most memorable smooches. It uses the Google Maps API for the base map and for geocoding. You can add your own, and look up kisses in five different categories. For more information, see the Google Lat Long post.
Google Vector Layers: “Google Vector Layers allows you to easily add one or more vector layers from a number of different geo web services to a Google Maps API based application. Currently there's support for ArcGIS Server, Arc2Earth, GeoIQ and CartoDB with more planned.”
jsFiddle: “jsFiddle is a playground for web developers, a tool which may be used in many ways. One can use it as an online editor for snippets build from HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The code can then be shared with others, embedded on a blog, etc.” Many people are starting to use jsFiddle get help debugging their code in developer forums.
Tips for approaching Google Developer Advocates: I posted this on Google Plus, thought it might be helpful.
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:
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/.
It’s Fab Friday again! I missed last week, felled by a nasty cold. But you can’t keep Fab Friday down. Just back, I decided to roll out this screencast on Autocomplete in the Places Library of the Google Maps API:
As you can see, there’s a lot you can do with autocomplete.
Continuing my attachment to maps of imaginary places, here’s a map of Skyrim, from the video game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
The map uses the Google Maps API Custom Map Type to display custom tiles.
I also love tools that allow you to create your own maps, like Harvard World Map. World Map allows you to create a map based on datasets that are provided, and allows you to add your own data layers. You can then embed those maps in other sites or link to them on the World Map site. This example shows population density in China:
Have a good weekend!
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