Google Earth and a plan for San Francisco job growth

I don’t know the details of Ed Lee’s political agenda, and that information is irrelevant for this post, but he’s recently used Google Earth in a very creative way. In one of his recent TV ads, Ed made great use of Google Earth to help show off his plan for creating new jobs across the San Francisco area.

Details on how the video was created aren’t available, but it appears that they simply took some carefully-planned Google Earth footage and then added all of the labels and highlights in a video editing suite like Final Cut Pro. As such, no KML or tour are available.

Interestingly, they apparently chose to shoot the footage with the 3D Tree layer turned off, or else they created the video prior to last November when 3D trees were unveiled in San Francisco. For example, the park shown at the 0:20 mark of the video looks much better with the tree layer enabled:

ed-lee.jpg

That said, it’s an excellent way to show off this kind of information in a quick commercial. The high altitude between stops helps to show users where they are, and the solid 3D coverage in the San Francisco area really helps it come to life.

(via Politico)

Visibility versus Authentication and Authorization: Service On/Off

You may have already noticed, but the controls to enable and disable individual apps in Google Apps are now all in one place on the domain Control Panel under Organization & users > Services.

Domain administrators were already able to use this tab to enable and disable the Core Google Apps suite. Now they can do the same for apps they’ve acquired from the Google Apps Marketplace. This replaces the old link labeled “Disable {app name}” in the Dashboard > {app name} > “App status” page.

App and Gadget Visibilty

This on/off switch controls app and gadget visibility. Users in suborganizations where a Marketplace App is ON will see that app in the universal navigation bar under “More”, and will see the app’s contextual gadgets in Gmail. Users where the App is OFF will not see these links or gadgets.

Your customers still configure all apps through the Dashboard tab, but now the Control Panel Services tab unifies how they enable and disable every app.

New Scoping by Suborganization

The unified controls also share an important new scoping capability: now a domain administrator can select a suborganization and control which Marketplace Apps are visible to that organizational unit, just like the Core Google Apps suite!

In the example below, the administrator has overridden the domain settings for four Marketplace Apps to make three new tools visible to just the “Engineering” suborganization and to hide one application.

Visibility versus Authentication and Authorization

As developers, you should note that for any valid Google Apps domain user who goes directly to your website, OpenID/Single Sign On will always authenticate them if their domain has OpenID enabled. This includes users who are in suborganizations where your app is OFF. That means this visibility toggle feature is not a substitute for checking that the users accessing your app have a valid license.

Similarly, the on/off switch does not affect the OAuth scopes your app has been granted when the domain admin installed your app — the admin only revokes those by explicitly revoking data access or by deleting your app. The control panel on/off switch is just a way for a domain administrator to control the visibility of apps and gadgets that would otherwise be site-wide.

Van Gogh on Crossing the Line

 

“The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found those dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.”

– Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)

Dutch painter

We earn more challenges by dealing with and overcoming more challenges.

Embrace your experience. Enjoy the weather.