Friday, May 21, 2010

Geo Highlights from Day 2 of Google I/O

Wow, Day 1 at I/O was such a big day Geo, it would be hard to top it. But there were some amazing gems. Check out these highlights:

  1. Styled Maps! Probably the biggest news of day 2. Maps API V3 now gives you the option to style your maps. Don't like golden highways and green forests? Change it! Check out our announcement for more details and links.
  2. Matt Lowrie gave a great talk on the SketchUp API and using SketchUp.
  3. Josh Livni and I previewed a whole bunch of additions to the Earth API and a new KML extension. In particular, Earth API now has control over the time slider, and better balloon handling. Now, you can preserve your JS and Flash in the balloons. In KML, we previewed the Track extension, which will allow you to assign multiple way points to a model or point and move it around, rather than recreating them with multiple Timestamps.
  4. Finally, and this was actually announced on Wednesday, you can now add a FusionTable layer to a Maps API V3 app, right from the API.
It's really exciting to see all this. We're closing the loop on a lot of developer requested features, and we're really happy. Thanks for those of you who came or watch it on video.

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