Google Earth Becomes a Browser Plugin

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Wednesday, May 28. 2008

Google Earth Becomes a Browser Plugin

That from Brady at O'Reilly Radar. It's being announced today at Google I/O, a developer event. Oh, only on Windows. [Removed: "And, no imagery yet. (huh?)" I misunderstood post, as noted in comment below.]

Is this a big deal? Does making it a plugin vs. a standalone app matter that much?

The one minute intro video is below.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Google at 11:30 | Comments (6) | Trackbacks (0)

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> And, no imagery yet.

Not sure where you get that idea, you certainly do get imagery - and the fundamental layers.

http://code.google.com/apis/earth/

#1 Barry Hunter (Link) on 2008-05-28 12:52 (Reply)

Barry,

Sorry, I guess I misread this statement from Brady: "This release does not change Google Maps, the mapping site on Google's domain; it will not be serving up Google Earth imagery (yet)."

I've corrected the error in the post.

Adena

#1.1 Adena Schutzberg (Link) on 2008-05-28 15:11 (Reply)

ah I see, I beleive that is a reference that this doesnt mean the merging the Earth imagry into Maps, (although thay use basically the same imagry anyway) ... but not totallty sure.

#1.1.1 Barry Hunter (Link) on 2008-05-28 15:48 (Reply)

It's a big deal. They've achieved technical parity with VirtualEarth on the developer front, and with a very similar solution... code your app with the standard Maps API and add 3D with a single switch. For building integrated apps, the plugin-with-javascript-api concept that Microsoft rolled out with VirtualEarth was very compelling. Stand-alone Google Earth was a better app for simple data sharing, via KML, but for more complex integration it fell apart. Now Google is in the custom development game again, firing on all cylinders. And we can expect that they, unlike Microsoft, will be moving smartly to support more platforms with their plugin. OS/X next?

#2 Paul Ramsey on 2008-05-28 13:01 (Reply)

Here we go again..ooooo...ahhhh...Google. Besides MS, NASA World Wind Java does the same damn thing(intergration in website). But it doesn't have Google on it, so it doesn't exist.

KoS

#3 KoS on 2008-05-28 14:05 (Reply)

What Paul said.

This fills a longstanding request from many users of Google Earth: scriptability (I was going to say programmability, but there was already a COM API).

The fact that its running in the browser is not as interesting as the capability developers now have to control the end users experience to a far greater degree than with straight network links / KML. This opens up a huge range of possibilities.

I'll be interested though to see if it has similar issues with external data size as Google Maps (and friends) do.

#4 Jason Birch (Link) on 2008-05-28 19:37 (Reply)

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