Google Earth: Take a festive tour for St. Patrick’s Day

People all over the world today are celebrating Saint Patrick’s Day in many different ways. You might walk in a local parade, spot a leprechaun, get pinched for not wearing green, bake some corned beef and cabbage, or even dare to drink a green pint.

For me, this holiday is not just about enjoying a feast with friends (even though I love baking the soda bread) – it’s also about going back to my Irish family heritage. Since Google Maps with Street View is available in Ireland, I went back to one of my favorite spots, Roundstone fishing village, that I visited two years ago. The winding, coastline roads are just as I remember them.

To get into the spirit, you can also play a Google Earth Tour to visit special places in Ireland and places around that world that celebrate this holiday. Fly to the Kilkenny Castle in 3D, see an exit ramp in the shape of a Shamrock, and visit an Irish village. We’ve also added the tour to the Google Earth Gallery so you can download the file and explore on your own.

Every year, the Chicago river turns green for the St. Patrick’s Day Parade

For this Irish celebration, you can also add your own 3D buildings to Google Earth. With Google Building Maker, find your spot in Dublin, Ireland and quickly model a building using our photos. Or, try your hand at SketchUp and add your own creations to Google Earth anywhere in the world (buildings above were created by users).


So now we’ve given you plenty of ideas on how to celebrate this Irish holiday. Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Lewis on The Small Things

“The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of.”

–C.S. Lewis (1898–1963)
Irish writer and scholar

Sales attention…

How many of us have wished we’d given something (or someone) a little extra effort or attention earlier in the quarter/ year rather than later?

Lewis’s thought encourages us to care about what/ who is in front of us now… to fully use today (this salesday) and enjoy what it brings us in the future.

If you’ve not seen them, a few things we hope you enjoy during a well-earned break or over the weekend…

  • A quick (2.5 min.) video made by Chick-fil-A to remind their employees that their customers are people and they may have things going on in their lives (a good thing to remember as you sell and service your prospects and customers).
  • My personal experiment: A device diet last year that led to a permanent change for the better (speaks to that ‘life in front’ of you point).
  • A great little 15-minute video on the value of a smile, being encouraging and resilient, and the impact we have on others (even when we don’t realize it).

TBIF

(too bad it’s Friday, the last salesday of the week)

HTML5 Games, Jammed

Last month, more than 50 developers assembled in Hilversum, Netherlands, and San Francisco, California for an HTML5 game jam.

The idea of HTML5 gaming may seem unusual, but if the results from this event are anything to go by, there will be plenty more HTML5 games in the future. In just over 24 hours of coding, attendees were able to produce the seeds of great games, powered by standard web technologies. The games we saw were novel, visually appealing, and in many cases, already very playable.

HTML5 is making it easy to develop games for standard web browsers, and it also provides a way for developers to reach mobiles and tablets with a single code base. Watch for other initiatives, like Mozilla’s current HTML5 gaming competition, to take HTML5 gaming to the next level.

Here’s a look at the winners from both venues. You can see a detailed list of all the entries here.

First Place, San Francisco: Ninja Leap

A novel 8-bit style game where you “leap” over the bad guys. A good demo of the Canvas element and a complete game with levels and scoring. Congratulations David Ganzhorn and Mike Rotondo on winning the HTML5 Game Jam in the USA.

First Place, Hilversum: Monkey Fortress

A puzzle game where you build a fortress to protect the monkey, demonstrating a physics engine in Canvas. Congratulations Tom Hastjarjanto on winning the HTML5 Game Jam in Europe.

Second Place, San Francisco: Shell Shock

A platform shooter involving turtle-like creatures on wheels, using Canvas. By Wolff Dobson, Charles Lee, Nicolas Coderre, Dan Fessler, Sara Asher. (No online demo at present.)

Second Place, Hilversum: Snakes

A refresh on the classic “Snake” game, demonstrating multiplayer powered by NodeJS and WebSocket, and 3D transforms of the canvas element. By David Durman & Ales Sturala. (No online demo at present, but code repository available.)

Third Place, San Francisco: Fruit Link

A casual puzzle game by Bruno Garcia, where you link up adjacent matching fruit.

Third Place, Hilversum: Enterprise

A stunning 3D game inspired by the classic Syndicate series showcasing just how far we’ve come with Canvas-based graphics. Observe the collision detection and be sure to hit the “Flying Carpet” button as well as the space bar to fire! This game was also shown in the “Web or Native for Mobile Development?” session at the recent Google Developer Days conferences in Europe. Created by Kornel Lesinski, Peter van der Zee, and Edwin Martin.

A few other readily playable games you might enjoy are:

We were also honoured to have keynotes by two pioneers of web-based gaming. In Hilversum, the speaker was Tino Zijdel, creator of DHTML Lemmings back in 2004. Tino, coincidentally a Hilversum local, explained the tricks he used to make the game playable on the browsers of the day. He has subsequently written his account of the Game Jam. It’s in Dutch, so here’s an English translation. There were additional presentations from from Yu Jianrong, who covered ten tips for HTML5 Game Development and Paul Irish on HTML5.

The San Francisco keynote was given by Marcin Wichary, who gave a keynote on games and HTML5. Marcin is the creator of the Pac-Man doodle and also the first version of the popular HTML5Rocks slides. Marcin talked about his experiences in recreating Pac-Man and the timeless aspects of videogaming in modern age, shared some behind-the-scenes trivia, and shared the technology used to write the doodle and debug it.

We thank SPIL Games for hosting and co-organising the Netherlands event, and we also thank Samsung for contributing a Galaxy Tab for the Game Jam at that venue. Developers working on touch apps were able to use the Tab for testing, and we later gave the device away as a prize. Congratulations all who took part!

You can find more details about the event, including links to code repositories and further demos, at HTML5GameJam.com.

By Michael Mahemoff, Chrome Developer Relations