You can put +1 over your favorite maps

Google launched the +1 button for custom maps in Google Maps. By clicking the +1 button you can tell other viewers that a particular map is helpful. It’s also a way to thank the specific map author for creating a useful custom map. For instance, say your friend created an awesome map of Hawaii Hikes and Surfing. Now you can let them know it was handy by clicking the +1 button. You can find the +1 button underneath the map description on public maps when you‘re signed into to your Google account.

 

You can keep track of your +1’d maps by going to your Google+ profile, and clicking the +1 tab. Your +1’s are always public, but your +1’s tab doesn’t have to be. You can choose to show this tab to the world, or simply use it to manage your record of things you love around the web. Currently, the +1 button only shows up on maps.google.com and not on embedded views of maps.

Maps you +1 show up on your profile  

But don’t just +1 other peoples’ maps, get +1’d yourself! Create your own custom maps and share your must-stop-spots for travel destinations or your own neighborhood. Custom maps enable you to highlight sites, restaurants, shops, routes and more for anyone you choose to send your map to. To get the link for your map, open the map and then click the link button in the upper right. Copy and paste this link into an email or IM or post it to your Google+ profile so others can find it.

Send out links to your custom map 

Create Maps. Share Maps. +1 Maps.

App Engine 1.5.2 SDK Released

 

As the summer heat descends on the Northern Hemisphere we thought we’d release our newest App Engine version with some changes that are sure to keep you playing around in the cool, air-conditioned indoors (hey, you don’t want your computer to overheat, right?).

Production Changes

  • Adjustable Scheduler Parameters – As we previously discussed, we are introducing two scheduler knobs (okay, they actually look like sliders) that will allow you to control some of the parameters that influence how many Instances run your application. Today you will be able to set the minimum pending latency and maximum number of idle instances for your application.

Datastore Changes

  • Advanced Query Planning – We are removing the need for exploding indexes and reducing the custom index requirements for many queries. The SDK will suggest better indexes in several cases and an upcoming article will describe what further optimizations are possible.
  • Namespaced Datastore Stats – Now, in addition to getting overall datastore stats, we are providing a new option to query datastore stats per namespace.

Task Queue Changes

  • New Task Queue details page – We’ve revamped the Task Queue details page in the Administration Console to provide more information about the tasks being run. You can now see the headers included in the enqueued task, the payload, and information from previous task runs.
  • 1MB Pull Task Size – It’s our belief that there is only one way for size limits to go – and that’s up! So with this release we’ve increased the size for pull tasks to 1MB.
  • Pull queue lease modification – We’ve introduced a new method for Pull Queues that allows you to extend the lease on existing tasks if the initial lease on the task was insufficient.

Lastly, we have some exciting news related to the experimental Go runtime. While it still remains experimental, starting with 1.5.2, all HRD apps will have access to the Go runtime in production.

As always, there are also some small features and bug fixes, the full list of which can be found in our release notes (Python, Java). We look forward to your feedback and questions in our forum.

Create Indoor Shopping Mall Maps

Google I/O App for Android


For the Google I/O conference this year Google created a pretty cool Android App that included a number of features, including a schedule, details about the sessions, buzz about I/O via a real-time search stream and a conference map.

Google has now open-sourced the code for the app. If you want to create a similar app for a conference you can download the code and adapt it to suit your needs.

One of my favourite presentations from Google I/O this year was Map Your Business Inside Out by Brendan Kenny and Chris Broadfoot of Google. Essentially in the presentation Brendan and Chris demonstrated how the Google Maps API can be used to create indoor maps for large conference centers or shopping malls.

You can view the presentation in full in this video:

In the presentation Brendan and Chris explain how you can attach floor-plan overlays to a Google Map, how you can label the floor-plan and how you can develop custom Street Views for your map.

If you are interested in creating your own indoor map then you might find these resources useful: