The great Football resources in Google Earth

 

With NFL and NCAA football both in high gear, we thought we’d take a look at various football-related resources in Google Earth.

A few years back, Google showed off all of the 245 NCAA football stadiums, many of which are in 3D. You can explore them yourself using this KML file.

 

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Another way to see them is by viewing some of the stadium collections on EarthSwoop, which allow you to fly from stadium to stadium via the Google Earth Plug-in: ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, PAC 10, SEC and the entire NFL.

Speaking of the NFL, it’s worth checking out Cowboys Stadium in Dallas. It hosted the Super Bowl earlier this year, and it’s an amazing model. If you’re looking to play some football, you can check out the Google Earth-based football game that I created a few years ago. I’m sure it could be done better with the Google Earth Plug-in now, but it’s still pretty fun.

Android’s New Public APIs in ICS

 

 

Since Android is open-source, anyone can look at the code and see how it works inside. If you do this, you’ll notice that most but not all of the APIs arepublicly documented.

If they’re publicly documented, they’re part of what we consider the Android Application Framework. This means their tests appear in the Compatibility Test Suite (CTS) so that our hardware partners have to prove that the APIs work, and that we promise to try very hard not to change them and thus break your code.

In almost every case, there’s only one reason for leaving APIs undocumented: We’re not sure that what we have now is the best solution, and we think we might have to improve it, and we’re not prepared to make those commitments to testing and preservation.

We’re not claiming that they’re “Private” or “Secret” — How could they be, when anyone in the world can discover them? We’re also not claiming they’re forbidden: If you use them, your code will compile and probably run. And in fact we know of quite a few apps out there whose developers have used undocumented APIs, often to good effect. It’s hard to get too upset about this in cases where there’s a useful API that we haven’t gotten around to stabilizing.

But the developers who use those APIs have to be prepared to deal with the situation that arises when we move them from the undocumented outside into the Android Application Framework. Fortunately, this is reasonably straightforward. Also we take a close look at Android Market, using our in-house analytics tools, to get a feel for the impact when we know one of these changes is coming.

There are a few such changes coming up in the Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” (ICS) release of Android. We wanted to take the opportunity to combine these words on undocumented APIs with some specifics about the changes.

Calendars

Let’s start with the good news: As of ICS, the Android Framework will include a fully-worked-out set of APIs for accessing Calendar data. You can guess the bad news: Quite a few developers have built apps (including many good ones) using the undocumented Calendar APIs, some using fairly low-level access to the calendar database. Unfortunately, these integrations were unsupported, and prone to breakage by platform updates or OEM customization of calendar features.

We want to see lots of good calendar apps and extensions that work reliably across Android devices, and aren’t broken by platform updates. So we decided to create a clean API, including a comprehensive set of Intents, to manage calendar data in ICS. Now anyone can code against these new APIs and know that Android is committed to supporting them, and that partners have to support these APIs as part of CTS.

Once the new APIs arrive, you’re going to have to update your apps before they’ll run correctly on ICS while still working on older releases. There are a variety of techniques for doing that, many of which have been featured on this blog, including reflection and lazy loading. Recently, we introduced Multiple-APK support, which could also be used to help with this sort of transition.

Text To Speech

Android has never really had a text-to-speech API at the Framework level, but there was unofficial access at the C++ level. With ICS, we will have a fully-thought-through application-level API running on Dalvik, so you can access it with ordinary Java-language application code.

The old C++ API will no longer be supported, but we’ll have a compatibility layer that you can use to bridge from it to the new API. We think it should be easy to update for ICS with very little work.

Doing the Right Thing

We recognize that this means some work for developers affected by these changes, but we’re confident that Android programs in general, and both Calendar and TTS apps in particular, will come out ahead. And we also think that most developers know that when they use undocumented APIs, they’re making a commitment to doing the right thing when those APIs change.

 

The historic and cultural sites of Mexico

Nothing compares to the sensation of visiting a place where history was made. Exploring castles, pyramids and other historical landmarks in a country provokes a deeper understanding and respect for unique cultures and creates a sense of belonging. Today, technology enables us to expand our horizons in a matter of clicks, bringing foreign cultures and history to us from around the world.

Mexico is a country full of natural beauty and cultural heritage. It’s archaeological sites attract hundreds of thousands of tourists each year. Today, we are making these historical landmarks more accessible than ever by bringing an interactive atlas from the National Institute of Anthropology to Google Earth.

Download the new KML file of this historical archive to view geo-referenced scale models (many in 3D) of monuments, archaeological sites, museums and other buildings that make up the cultural heritage of Mexico.

View the historic and cultural sites that make up Mexico’s history from anywhere in the world.
Through Google Earth, you can virtually visit 416 locations across Mexico, including 182 archaeological sites, 116 museums, 31 world heritage sites, 83 3D models and 4 schools. Many of the models presented in this interactive guide were created through the ‘Put Mexico on the map’ competition recently hosted by Google and the National Institute of Anthropology.

Learn more about this effort that helps bring Mexico’s history to life by visiting www.OneWorldManyStories.com. We hope this new resource makes it fun to both learn about Mexico’s rich cultural heritage and plan your next Mexican vacation.