This Bing Map lets you view historical maps of Berlin. The map features an innovative ‘timescope’ that you can drag over the modern map of Berlin whilst viewing the historical map through the timescope.
If you wish to view a different historical map of Berlin you can select a date from the bottom of the timescope. It is also possible to adjust the transparency of the historical map to view the modern map beneath. On the right hand side of the map are quick links to some of Berlin’s top sights.
Links to typographic maps of one sort or another — and it turns out that there is more than one sort — continue to come out of the woodwork, in numbers sufficient to warrant their own category. The latest comes from Janne Aukia, who writes with links to two word maps of the world he made a couple of years ago. Each is a map of the world made up of phrases describing cities, with colours and font sizes matching population size. One is “a map with Google search matches that are of the format ‘is * for its,’ such as ‘Helsinki is * for its’” (above); the other is of adjectives describing cities on Wikitravel. Janne describes the maps on his blog, here and here (in Finnish, but Google Translate isn’t bad).
Links to a number of GPS reviews have been piling up in my files over the past few months, and mentioning them here is long overdue. During that time, GPS Tracklog has had reviews of the Garmin nüvi 2350LMT and TomTom GO 2505TM automotive GPS receivers, as well as the Magellan eXplorist 710 outdoor receiver. GPS Review, meanwhile, reviewed the Garmin nüLink! 1695, a “connected” receiver. A review of the DeLorme Earthmate PN-60w appeared on the Adirondack High Peaks Forum (via @DeLormeGPS). And finally, Garmin’s Forerunner 210 watch got a review from DC Rainmaker (via @gpstracklog).
Greg’s Cable Map is an attempt to consolidate all the available information about the World’s undersea communications infrastructure on a Bing Map. The initial data for the map was harvested from Wikipedia, and further information was gathered by simply Googling and transcribing as much data as possible.
If you mouse-over any of the displayed cables on the map a brief description is displayed at the bottom of the map. If you click on the cable more details are displayed in the map sidebar and links are given to relevant websites.
Ever since we launched Google TV last October, we’ve seen web developers optimize their sites for TV with amazing results. However, designing a 10 foot UI and implementing controls optimized for the television is still a foreign concept for most web developers. Understanding that challenge, we’re happy to release new templates and a UI library to make it easy for developers to optimize their sites for TV.
Google TV comes with the Chrome browser that supports familiar technologies such as HTML5, JavaScript, CSS and Flash. Keeping this in mind, we have created two template designs in HTML5 and Flash that are focused on delivering video content, but equally suitable for photos or other multimedia:
For those developers who prefer to design their own 10 foot UI, we’ve created the Google TV Web UI Library to enable TV friendly controls such as D-pad (up, down, left, right) navigation. To accommodate different web developers needs, the Google TV Web UI Library is provided in 2 different flavors; jQuery based and Closure based. Get started by downloading the library and reading the documentation and tutorials.
Both the templates and the library are available under the Apache 2 license. As always, we love to hear your feedback. Please post comments and questions on the library and templates to our Google TV Web Developer Forum. Happy coding!