Google maps and GPS tracks.

	WikiLoc This site uses the JavaScript Maps API to let users upload and share GPS tracks. It embeds the Panoramio GLayer to let users see photos near their waypoints, and also displays an altitude chart for your track. It also supports input/export of common GPS file formats. They offer a native mobile phone app that captures GPS points and uploads the data to the site for you. Additionally, they let you create your own tracks by placing points on the map and rendering them as polylines.
	GPSies - Tracks for Vagabonds GPSies - Tracks for Vagabonds Another site for managing GPS tracks, which works great with free, native mobile applications for Android and iPhone devices. The mobile apps are simple and easy to use, helping you monitor and save your tracks, and then upload them over the air to GPSies where they are visible in your tracks list. The visualization is a robust JavaScript Maps API implementation that overlays a polyline across the GPS points. Nice additions include mile marker points (also in metric), integrated altitude charts that follow the polyline with mouse-move events, and integration of the DragZoomControl for easier zooming into an area of interest.
	Trailspotting.com This outdoor site boasts an outstanding collection of hiking trails in Northern California and Hawaii. In-depth reviews, photos and comments are coupled with Google My Maps for visualization. Stuart and Jenna, the outdoor enthusiasts who run this terrific site, go the extra mile to include enhanced content like area facts, photography, nearby POI, and location web sites.
	Topo! Explorer I bought the 10 CD set of Topo! from NatGeo years ago and really enjoyed browsing/zooming into locations, then printing my own weatherproof map before embarking on an expedition. Today, they've made this much easier. A free registration gets you access to browse the latest Topo! maps which uses our JavaScript Maps API as a framework to explore their custom map tiles.

Google Maps API and >40 languages

Good morning! G'day! Bom dia! Bonjour! доброе утро! 早安! доброго ранку!

This is how we, members of the Maps API team, would salute each other if we decided to use our native languages in the mornings. And those are just a minuscule sample of the multitude of the native languages for Googlers all over the world.

But this is only one of the reasons we are so passionate about translating our products to as many languages as possible. Our mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Providing our services in the native tongue of our users goes a long way towards achieving the universal accessibility and usefulness aspects of our mission.

You can find the list of languages here. (Right to left languages are notably missing from this list, as we still have some work to do before we can support them.)

Most developers won't need to do anything to take advantage of the new translations, our servers will decide what language to provide based on the browser's preferred languages settings.

Developers can override that behavior (and force all of their users to see one language) by specifying a parameter in the script tag. For instance, to force UI controls to always be displayed in Brazilian Portuguese, use:

2 ex-amples; google maps, Fusion Table; trails; heatmap

If you have ever tried to plot a very large number of overlays on an API map you have probably reached a point at which the performance of your application begins to suffer. With one hundred or so markers, most browsers cope just fine, and clustering solutions like Fluster can help support more. But if you have thousands of overlays that you wish to show, rendering them individually can be problematic.

The Maps API v3 now offers two solutions to this problem. If you have a large volume of geospatial data that can be served as KML, the KmlLayer class can render up to 50,000 features as an overlay that does not impact performance on any browser. To support data sets that are structured as tables, such as a database or spreadsheet, we have also now added the FusionTablesLayer class for rendering data stored in Google Fusion Tables.

Google Fusion Tables is a fascinating new experimental Google Research project offering storage, search, and management of large structured data sets in the cloud. Up to 100MB of data can be stored per table, and each row in a table can have an associated location, line, or polygon feature. Using the FusionTablesLayer class you can render features on an API map as a clickable overlay. When a feature is clicked, the application can access a copy of the complete row of data associated with the feature.

Fusion Tables also supports an SQL like query language, which you can use to filter the features shown on a map. The below map visualises mountain biking trails uploaded to Fusion Tables bymtbguru.com. The slider allows you to filter trails by their length, and the trails shown on the map are updated accordingly. If you click on a trail a custom dialog is shown which indicates the elevation profile for the trail concerned.

 

The FusionTablesLayer also supports rendering data sets as a heatmap. The below map of beaches in Brazil illustrates the benefit of this. When rendered as point features it is difficult to tell the relative density of the beaches without zooming in further. However once you switch to displaying the data as a heatmap the high density of beaches west of Rio de Janeiro becomes immediately clear.

 

The combination of Fusion Tables with the Maps API makes it easy to host large sets of data in the cloud, and visualise them in your Maps API application. It is quick and simple to get up and running with Fusion Tables, and the addition of the FusionTableLayer class to Maps API v3 enables Maps applications to be tightly coupled with data hosted in Fusion Tables. Give it a try, and let us know what you think of this experiment in the Groups!

mashup ; Google Maps API

The Google Maps API turns 5! - add your mashup to the map

Map data ©2011 Geocentre Consulting - Terms of Use

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Join in the celebration ... pin your mashup to the map!

This ProgrammableWeb dashboard shows that of the apps built and submitted over the past 2 weeks, a quarter of them make use of the Google Maps API. Click the 'All Time' tab and you'll see that nearly half of the almost 5000 cataloged mashups use it.

Today, on this 5 year milestone, we really have all of you to thank for this incredible chapter in web and mapping development. The remarkable levels of innovation, creativity and interest have come from all of you. You saw the possibilities the Google Maps API held and what it could be combined with to create, and you built it. Now join us to celebrate! Keir Clarke from Google Maps Mania hascreated a mashup that we want all of you to contribute to. Since we can’t all share a giant cake, I think it’s fitting that we all build a giant mashup of mashups to mark this special API birthday. Please tag your Google Maps mashup or tool to the map wherever you are: