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My Location in Google Maps

When getting directions on Google Maps, we suggest an origin or destination after you type the first few characters. But, we want to save you even more time by eliminating the need to type your current address each time. Today you can start using ‘My Location’ as a starting or ending point for your directions using the familiar ‘blue dot’ found in Google Maps for mobile.

Directions with ‘My Location’ enabled
Now when you get directions on Google Maps, you’ll see “My Location” in the starting location field. All that is left for you is to fill in the destination and hit “Get Directions”.

The first time you use “My Location,” your browser will ask you to allow Google Maps to get your approximate physical location. If you accept, the dot next to “My Location” will turn from grey to blue, indicating Google Maps has retrieved your current location.

Depending on your browser, you can choose to have Google Maps ask you every time you use the “My Location” feature, or to remember your setting for Google Maps. You can also always opt-out by revoking the permission in your browser’s settings.

This feature is possible thanks to modern browsers supporting the GeoLocation API. If you are using one of the supporting browsers–Firefox V3.5+, Google Chrome, Opera 10.6+, Internet Explorer 9.0+, and Safari 5–Google Maps can use this technology to approximate your current location and use it as an origin or destination point.

To help you manage your privacy, Google Maps does not save your location when you enable this feature. You can also easily turn off the “My Location” feature and control your browser’s ability to provide your location to Google Maps through the browser’s settings.

With “My Location”, a second or two saved every time you get directions on Google Maps can add up!

Google Maps Design Evolution

The start of a comprehensive visual redesign for Google Maps founded on three key principles: focus, elasticity, and effortlessness. This week Google continuing to implement that philosophy by improving and evolving a few key features.

Perhaps the most notable change is an update to the styling and color of iconic pins across all Google properties. This change reflects our interface’s recent design evolution, introducing a more harmonious visual relationship between the on-map markers and the map itself.

On-map controls are also now more visually aligned with the rest of our design system. Together these changes reflect our recent efforts to reduce unnecessary clutter and give greater priority to information on the map.

In the header we’re also introducing more prominent buttons for Directions and My places integrated into an elastic interface that expands and contracts to best fit your browser window size.

Putting all of these changes together you get:

We hope you find this a welcome update making Google Maps more functional, effortless, and enjoyable. This is just one part of the many design updates that will continue rolling out across Google Maps in the coming weeks and months, so keep an eye out for more!

Google Environment: Integrated Mobile Apps

The Google Apps Marketplace is a storefront for Google Apps customers to discover, purchase, deploy and manage web applications which are integrated with Google Apps. These applications are typically used from desktops and laptops, but many vendors on the Apps Marketplace have also optimized the experience for their users who are on-the-go. There are several different strategies for enabling a mobile workforce, and each requires a different approach to authentication and authorization.

Lightweight: Synchronize Contacts, Calendars and Docs with Google Apps

Google has written applications and synchronization clients to help ensure that the core Google Apps data is available to users on their mobile devices, whether they’re on their mobile phones or tablets. By storing contacts, dates and documents from your application in Google Apps using the application APIs, you can leverage these features to provide a mobile view for your users.

Since you’re only accessing the application APIs on your web application’s server, and the user has already linked up their mobile device to their Google account, there are no special techniques for authentication and authorization when using this lightweight approach.

Standards-based: Build a mobile-optimized web application

With the latest advances in HTML5 web technologies such as offline and local storage, it’s possible to build mobile interfaces for business apps which are full-featured and accessible to users on many devices. The primary goal in building the mobile web application is to optimize the user experience for different input devices, form factors and limitations in network availability and bandwidth.

Because the application is in a web browser, most of the changes to implement are in the frontend– HTML, JavaScript and CSS. User authentication and data authorization continue to use the same OpenID and OAuth technologies as are used for the desktop/laptop version of the application.

Device-custom: Build native companion apps for mobile devices

Does your application need access to hardware-specific APIs which are not available in a web browser, or do you feel a great user experience can only be achieved using native code? Several Apps Marketplace vendors have built native applications for popular mobile platforms like Android and iOS. Although it takes considerably more effort to build multiple native applications to cover the major platforms, these vendors can also take advantage of the additional distribution channels offered by mobile stores.

Authentication and authorization are often challenging for developers building native mobile applications because they cannot simply ask users for a password if their app supports single-sign on to Google with OpenID. We recently published an article describing a technique using an embedded webview for accomplishing OpenID authentication in mobile apps. This article includes references to sample code for Android and iOS.