Google Earth Hacks blog

A couple of nice updates to the site:

vBulletin 4.0 — We’ve upgraded our forums to vBulletin 4.0, giving you more features and better security.

Top StreetView Submitters — We’ve had a “top submitters” list on our main site for a while, but some of you had asked for a similar list in our StreetView section.  Here you go!

If you ever have a problem with the site, or an idea for a new feature, please let us know in our “Site Issues and Questions” forum.  Thanks!

This is a pretty simple one.  I often find myself quickly needing to get the latitude/longitude for a particular point, and there’s not a simple way to get it.  There’s some easy ways, but none that are just simple and quick.  That’s what this fills.

Fire up Easy LatLon and browse around using the Google Earth Plug-in.  You can use the search box to find a location at the top by name or by address.  Every time the camera stops moving, the lat/lon on the left side of the page are updated.

Suppose you wanted to know the location of Yankee Stadium.  Go to Easy LatLon, type in “Yankee Stadium” at the top, and the results are there on the side.  Copy/paste them to whatever you need.

Like I said, it’s very simple.  I hope it’s helpful for you from time to time.

http://www.gearthhacks.com/easylatlon/

We’ve just reached a cool milestone.  One our most prolific file submitters, SpiderX22, has now had his files downloaded over a million times! He’s submitted more than 1200 files to the site over the years, and the total downloads for those files has just passed 1,000,000.  Great work, Spider!

I also want to recognize two other big submitters — McMaster_de and sladys.  They’ve both submitted more files than Spider has, though neither has reach a million downloads yet.  McMaster is well over 900,000 and will probably reach a million pretty soon.

You can see the full list of our Top 50 Submitters on this page.

It’s worth mentioning that sladys has also been an animal with our StreetView area, adding more than 3300 locations to that database!  He’s the main reason that section of the site has grown as large as it has.  There are a lot of neat things to find in there, so be sure to check it out.

Just a quick, fun note — the number of registered users in our forums has crossed the 100,000 mark.  Wow!

Thanks to all of you who have contributed over the years, and we look forward to many more!

Those those of you that use our forums and use Twitter, here’s a new account for you to follow — @GEHforums.  This Twitter account simply takes any new threads in the forums and tweets out the title of the thread and a link.  It’s a good way to keep up with new discussions without having to wade through the forums each day.  If you participate in a thread, then you can just “subscribe” to the thread when you’re posting to automatically receive e-mail updates of new posts.

Also, don’t forget about the main @gearthhacks Twitter account.  It currently posts items from the blog, but soon we’ll be pushing new file uploads to it as well.

Thanks!

Mickey

Google has brought out a handful of new 3D cities in the past few days.  Today saw the release of Seattle and Pittsburgh, both of which now have hundreds of full-color buildings and look excellent.  Here is a shot from Pittsburgh.

A few days ago, Google unveiled a new layer for Google Earth that has over 5700 hundred buildings from ancient Rome rebuilt in 3D.  It’s a slow-loading collection, but it is amazing.  Here is a short video introducing the new layer:

A couple of cool new things today:

Google Earth is now available as a free app for the iPhone.  Not only is it free, but it’s good!  It looks very similar to the normal Google Earth program, includes 3D terrain, Wikipedia/Panoramio icons and a few other goodies.  No 3D buildings, but that’s not a problem for now.  The interface is phenomenal, with superb gesture controls and even a bit of accelerometer support.  My wish for version 2 is that they offer some kind of KML support so we can push our own files out to it.

Google Maps StreetView is now in Spain.  They’ve added StreetView to four Spanish cities – Madrid, Sevilla, Valencia and Barcelona. As you find cool sights in those areas, be sure to post them to our StreetView section, which now has nearly 2500 locations in it!

Version 2.2 of the iPhone firmware should be out in a few weeks and promises to have StreetView support, so that will be kind of a mesh of these two items.  Hopefully the interface on that is as good as it is in the new Google Earth application.

As reported by Google Maps Mania and the Digital Earth Blog, Google Maps StreetView has just gotten a lot more imagery in France.  In particular, they now have:

• Lille
• Lyon
• Marseille
• Nice
• Paris
• Toulouse

If you find any cool stuff out there, be sure to submit it to our StreetView database.

My wife and I have been big fans of The Amazing Race for a few years now, so I thought it’d be fun to track their route throughout the season.  Below is their map after the first leg, from Los Angeles, CA to Salvador, Brazil.  I’ll be updating the map each week with more information, photos, etc, so check back each week to see the latest updates.

The red lines/icons are areas that have already been completed (as shown on TV), the green pushpin is their current location, and the yellow lines are the future destinations for the contestants.

Be sure to zoom in on each area of the map for more details and information.

View Larger Map

If you’re away from home and looking for something to kill some time, we’ve got your answer — GEH: Mobile.  It’s thousands of files from our database in the palm of your hand, in the format of a simple mobile website.  It’s designed with the iPhone in mind, but should work well with any recent smartphone.  Having only been able to test on an iPhone, I’d love to get some feedback from other smartphone users (N95, etc).

The mobile site gives you quick access to about 80% of our file library (no 3D models or image overlays).  You can view the newest files, most popular file, or view them by category.  Every file has a thumbnail, and will link you to the real location on Google Maps — on the iPhone it will launch the “Maps” application and take you there.  In addition, you can sort items by date/popularity, read full descriptions and view comments made by other users.

Visit the site on your phone by going to m.gearthhacks.com.  If you save a bookmark to your home screen on your iPhone, you’ll get a custom GEH icon as shown above.  Below are a few screenshots.

Have fun!