Virtual Earth 6.2 released, with stunning clouds

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Virtual Earth 6.2 has been released, with a whole host of new features.  Among them:

  • New imagery —  “Richer bird’s eye” and new 3D imagery, but I can’t find a list of what’s been updated.
  • Weather integration — Real-time clouds (see more below)
  • Localized maps — English, German, French, Italian and Spanish.
  • Near-matching — Helps find locations with alternate and similar spellings.
  • Landmark-based routing
  • Rich imagery for mobile users — Their screenshot shows an iPhone, but I can’t make it work on mine.  Maybe I need a specific URL?
  • One-click directions

The new imagery might be worth writing about, but I can’t find what’s new.  However, the clouds are very cool.  Fly down low in a city, look up, then wait a few seconds.  Pop!  There they are.

Unlike the clouds in Google Earth, these are fully 3D semi-transparent clouds.  Flying through them, they look almost real — it’s very impressive.There are a few downsides, though.  For one, they load in square tile areas.  If you fly too quickly, they’ll disappear until the next set loads.  Also, there is no way to leave them on and get a satellite view of an area from up high; if you fly very high above them, they simply go away to leave you with a clear view of the ground.

I’ll leave you with a short video demo of the clouds, shot by Frank Taylor at Google Earth Blog

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.  With it, you can really see just how cool this feature is.  He’s using a SpaceNavigator to fly through them, a tool which I strongly recommend for any avid Virtual Earth (or Google Earth) user.

MapQuest 4 Mobile now available for Blackberry

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MapQuest has just launched the beta of MapQuest 4 Mobile for a few Blackberry handsets.  It looks very much like all of MapQuest’s other recent launches — very nice, but nothing new.

Some of the features include things like “maps” (including aerial imagery), “directions”, “search”, “traffic” and “find me” (to track you along a route.  Certainly nice features for a handset, but nothing new.

Still, if you have a Blackberry it’s probably worth giving it a shot.  It’s currently compatible with the BlackBerry 8830 on Sprint and the Blackberry 8800, 8820 and 8310 on AT&T.  Of course, “support for additional handsets is coming soon.”  To get it, simply point your phone to www.mq4m.com

to get started.

The energy costs of Hurricane Ike

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Brian Timoney has made some nice updates to GulfImpact.com ahead of Hurricane Ike.  Not only does it give you the location and path of the storm, but it shows all of the affected oil wells in the Gulf, broken down by company.  He uses Virtual Earth to power it.

I’ve heard a lot of news stories about how gas prices are likely to shoot up due to this, and this site shows why.  Great site!

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Word of the Month: SPLOST III Referendum

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As I dropped my daughter off at school this morning, I couldn’t help but notice the marquee out front.  Check it out to the right.

“WORD OF THE MONTH: SPLOST III REFERENDUM”

Now, I can understand why the school is pushing SPLOST.  It’s a proposed 1% tax to help give more money to the local schools.  But is that really their “word of the month”?

In case they had mistakenly forgotten to remove the top line from the marquee or something, I checked the other side and it was exactly the same, so it seems to be intentional.  I had expected the word of the month to be something like “respect” or “freedom”, but I guess I’ll be helping my five-year-old with “SPLOST III REFERENDUM”.

That’s pretty dumb.

Pitiful email from East Cobb Pediatrics

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This was pretty sad.  I got an e-mail today from “[email protected]”, with the subject line simply “Flu Vaccines”.  Here is the complete body of the e-mail:

Flu season is coming and we wanted to let you know that we have flu shots and FluMist available now.  FluMist is indicated for healthy individuals 2-49 years of age. We will offer parents of our patients FluMist this year.  Please let us know when you schedule your childs appointment if you are interested.  It is not recommended for people with asthma.  Flu shots are indicated for individuals 6 months and older.  Please call or send us an appointment request through our website to schedule your appointment.  Thank you and we look forward to seeing you at your next visit.

Please log into your account, go to the My Patient Page, choose My Preferences, and select No Communication to opt out of future commnuications.

If you do not wish to receive this kind of communication from East Cobb Pediatrics, you can choose to opt out of it by logging in here (was linked) to change your preferences.

I thought it was missing some very key pieces.  To start, I had no idea who it was from until I saw the opt-out info at the bottom.  I’ve certainly never heard of “medfusion.net” before.  Also, it mentions that we should “call us or send us an appointment request through our website…”, but doesn’t provide the phone number or website URL.  Granted, I can look those up if I need them, but that’s just silly not to include them.

I thought it might be helpful to suggest some changes for future e-mails.  I hit “reply” and sent them a short message with some thoughts.  It bounced right back.  Apparently “[email protected]” is just a dead address.

We’re big fans on ECP.  They take great care of our kids and they do a nice job.  They just might want to work on their e-mail skills.

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Very cool 3D navigation product released

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A cool looking 3D navigation program called Navi2Go from 3DVU has just been released.  It uses real world imagery and terrain and puts it in the palm of your hand as a GPS navigation device.  It’s got the look and feel of Google Earth, with the usefulness of a TomTom.

Of course, the usefulness of a device like this is how well it routes, re-routes, and simply gets you from point A to point B.  I haven’t seen a real review of the device yet, so that remains to be seen.

As of now, it’s available on a wide variety of Windows Mobile, Symbian and BlackBerry devices, with iPhone support “coming soon”.

More information can be found at GISuser or on 3DVU.com.

Firefox 3 alpha 2 released

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It’s a great time to be a web user — the new browser wars are meaning more great features for all of us!  Firefox has been hard at work on version 3.1 for a while now, and they’ve just released the second alpha

version of 3.1.  So what does it bring to the table?

 

  • The “video element” of HTML 5, which allows for some cool use of video on a site (manipulate with JavaScript, translucent draggable videos, etc) without using Flash.
  • Web worker threads, that allow complex JavaScript to run in the background and not disrupt the speed of the page you’re on.
  • The highly-touted new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine isn’t yet ready, so it’s not enabled in this release.
  • Dragging tabs between windows no longer results in a page refresh.
The next few months will be interesting for Firefox and Chrome.  Most of these new features (other than the video element) are things that need to catch up to Chrome.  On the flip side, Chomes next big release will likely have a lot of features to try to catch up to Firefox (plug-ins, for one).  By the time they both catch up with each other, we should be looking at two amazing browsers!

Chrome now listed as a browser type in Google Analytics

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As of today, Google Analytics is now showing “Chrome” as a browser type in Google Analytics.  Visits from Chrome users over the last few days will be retroactively updated to show their use of Chrome over the next few days.

We’re showing Chrome usage at over 10% on this blog for the last three days, but webmaster/SEO blogs would certainly be skewed a bit high for something like that.  It’ll be very interesting to see what the numbers look like in a few weeks.

What percent of visitors on your

 blog are using Chrome?

Add your church site search to your Chrome home page

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One of the most talked about features of Google Chrome is the rather innovative home page.  It shows your nine most often viewed sites, along with some goodies along the sidebar.  The sidebar can include quick-search boxes for sites you often search.  As often as I’m searching our church site, I thought it’d be great to have it listed there but I couldn’t make it show up.  After a bit of tweaking, I got it to work.  Here’s what I did.

First, it’ll help if you have a true on-site search of some kind. From what I can tell, there’s no way to add search boxes if you use the Google custom search on your site.  If you find a way around that, let us know.

As for our site, it only took a couple of very small changes:

  • The search needs to produce a GET request, not a POST request.  The difference is that a GET request will put your search term in the URL, which is critical to make this work.
  • You may need to change your search string variable. I noticed that most sites use “s=whatever” when you search, so I changed ours to that to help Chrome easily figure out what we were doing.
  • That’s it!
As for getting it onto the sidebar, here is the two-step process that tends to work.  Try it with our church site if you want.
  1. Perform a search on the site, just like you normally would.
  2. After that Google should recognize that it’s a search and give you a new shortcut.  Start typing the URL of the site in the address bar at the top (“M-T-B-E-T…”).
  3. After a few letters, a small bit of text should appear on the side that says “Press [tab] to search mtbethel.org”.  Go ahead and press [tab] and search for something.
  4. Done!
You should now have a quick-search box for our site on your Chrome start page.  There’s no way to manually remove it, but it will go away by itself after a while.  There seems to be a limit of three search boxes on your page, so if you have three already you may need to repeat step #3 (the [tab] search) a few times to encourage Chrome to replace one of the other ones.
That’s it!  Chome even uses your favicon to dress it up, and they look very nice.  If you have any questions or problems, please let us know in the comments below.