Google Maps: New 45° imagery for fun in the sun

Spring is in the air and it’s time to put away those jackets, dust off your shorts and get ready to see some sunshine! The Geo Imagery team has been hard at work in our snow covered buildings in Mountain View to get the latest set of imagery ready for everyone to enjoy.

When you think of sunshine, the first place that comes to mind for a lot people is Honolulu HI of course! With 45° in hand, scope out the ocean views from beachside hotels. You can check out Diamondhead, the coastline or the golf courses to reminisce on the vacation you’ve always wanted.

Waikiki, Honolulu, Hawaii

If you’re not the type that likes to watch the sunset while sipping on mai tais, then maybe a nice glass of wine on a piazza in Rome is more up your alley. Visit the Colosseum, Vatican City or Trevi Fountain all from the comfort of your own home. You can plan out your vacation first, then see it in person!


Colosseum, Rome, Italy

But if your true definition of love is being in the outdoors, by yourself and a set of golf clubs, nothing beats Palm Springs, CA, where there are over 120 golf courses. Believe it or not, Sonny Bono was mayor here from 1988–1992!


Palm Springs, CA

Keep an eye out for future updates, we’re always working hard to make sure our users get the latest and greatest imagery. For our full list of 45° imagery, see where we are in My Maps.

High Resolution Aerial Updates:
St Louis, MO
Honolulu, HI
New Orleans, LA
Rome, Italy
North Austin, TX
West Norfolk, VA
Scottsdale, AZ
San Rafael, CA
Palm Springs, CA
Lake Forest, CA
Boulder City, NV

Bringing Google I/O direct to you with I/O Live

After Google I/O sold out in 59 minutes, we gave ourselves a challenge: bring I/O 2011 to as many developers as we could, even those who didn’t have tickets to Moscone Center. So for those of you not joining us in San Francisco or at one of our I/O Extended viewing parties, visit www.google.com/io on May 10-11 from the comforts of your own home, office or anywhere you have a reliable Internet connection for I/O Live.

I/O Live will bring all of the excitement at Moscone Center to our website, where the keynotes, sessions and Developer Sandbox will come to life for audiences all over the world. Starting on May 10, the Google I/O homepage will become the I/O Live dashboard, where you can:

  • Watch livestream video feeds from our two largest session rooms from 9:00 a.m PDT to 6:00 p.m. PDT (16:00 to 01:00 UTC) during both days of the conference. This will include streaming of the keynotes, as in years past, as well as—new for 2011—the addition of sessions from Android and Chrome. We’ll also aim to post HD video recordings from sessions that are not livestreamed within 24 hours.
  • Read captions from the livestreamed sessions in real-time. Plus, to make sure all our content is accessible, all remaining videos will also be captioned. For international developers, captions will be machine translated to all languages that are supported by Google Translate.
  • Be one of the first to know by getting your news direct from the source. The latest announcements and news will be added to our I/O Live dashboard in real-time.
  • Submit your questions to our Sandbox developers. We’ll post answers for the questions with the most votes.

In the coming weeks, we’ll update our Sessions and Sandbox pages with all the relevant information you’ll need to participate in I/O Live. In the meantime, visit our temporary I/O Live page, where you can get our new HTML5 badge to display on your website and let us know that you’ll be watching on May 10th and 11th.

This year is slated to be our largest Google I/O event to date. So whether you’re joining us in San Francisco, from an I/O Extended event, or even from the comforts of your own Shangri-La, we’re looking forward to seeing you at 9 a.m. PDT (16:00 UTC) on May 10 as we count down to 00:00:00:00 and I/O Live.

Google I/O winners

It seems like only yesterday that we announced our Last Call for Google I/O contest. We’ve been keeping busy, judging Round 2 submissions for all 10 of our challenges. The winners have been notified via email and will receive a pass to this year’s sold-out Google I/O. Also, all of the Round 1 answers, as well as Round 2 prompts have been posted to the contest site.

We were really impressed with the quality of the submissions–especially with less than 24 hours to turn the code around! Check out screenshots of some of the winning entries below, along with notes from members of each Google Developer Relations group, and stay tuned for more surprises from the I/O team.

Android

Judging was easy for the Android challenge, because our first run through the apps produced a total of exactly 10 places where the reviewer said “Nice!”. Above you see a screenshot of the “Party mode” in Charles Vaughn’s “Bounce Clock”. Read about the details on our Android Developers Blog.

– Tim Bray, Android Developer Advocate

Chrome

(Click a doodle to go to its site and interact.)

We received a lot of nifty doodles and it was tough to pick only ten winners. Some of the particularly fun doodles were interactive or involved a game of some sort (like Pong, or Simon with the Chrome logo). We definitely appreciated being able to view the source code of the web page to see how developers took advantage of the latest HTML, CSS, and JS technologies.

– Jeffrey Chang, Chrome Product Manager

Games

(Click a screen shot to play a game.)

Congratulations to everyone who knew the Konami code and somehow managed to recall that Kuribo’s Shoe is only found on one stage of World Five in Super Mario Bros. 3…and after remembering all that, were still able to write a game in only 24 hours. Apparently playing video games as a kid doesn’t rot your brain as much as our moms said it would.

Almost all of our submissions were fun, technically impressive, or both. The judges were video game industry veterans, so we weren’t wowed by flashy graphics alone. We tried to reward a balance of fun gameplay and technical prowess. Some of the games were actually pretty addictive!

– Ian Lewis, Games Developer Advocate

YouTube

We saw some great submissions that put the new iframe Player API through its paces! The winning submissions offered a mix of cross-browser compatibility, stylish user interface, and the ability to reuse the player for arbitrary sequences anywhere on the web.

– Jeffrey Posnick, YouTube Developer Advocate

Apps

Our Google Apps challenge was built around Google Apps Script, a JavaScript cloud scripting language that allows developers to automate tasks across Google products and interact with 3rd-party APIs. In round 1, we asked contestants to find the median stock price of stock symbols. Round 2 was a fairly open challenge, and the winning submissions performed tasks such as predicting future traffic accidents on Google Maps, producing a daily meeting agenda using Google Calendar and LinkedIn, and sharing Flickr pictures via e-mail to friends and family.

– Ryan Boyd, Google Apps Developer Advocate

Accessibility

We enjoyed seeing how much the ten top entries were able to achieve in such a short time in developing a caption rating app for YouTube (at least one dedicated tweeter pulled an all-nighter). Our top picks really impressed us with the accessibility and polish of their UI. All of them have TalkBack speech support through the Android Accessibility API. Most of the winners have already published and open sourced their work. If these apps inspire you, take a look at the source and contribute!

– Naomi Black, Accessibility Technical Program Manager

Commerce

They say that great minds think alike, and in the case of Google Commerce, our developers created similar mashups. A simple store based on Google Product Search and Google Checkout could be a powerful tool for mom and pop shops. We hope our developers had fun learning about the commerce products that Google offers.

– Ossama Alami, Commerce/Geo Developer Relations

Geo

We asked developers to create a mobile web application to discover interesting walks around San Francisco. We had some really impressive entries, especially given they were developed in a very short timeframe.

– Ossama Alami, Commerce/Geo Developer Relations

Google Web Toolkit (GWT)

We were very impressed with the creativity and performance of the I/O countdown entries. All of the submissions were great examples of what is possible with GWT and HTML5/CSS3. It was an extremely tight competition that came down to tough decisions based on originality, visual appeal, and the size of the resulting JavaScript.

– Chris Ramsdale, GWT/Developer Tools Program Engineer

App Engine

Developers submitted a simple Fibonacci web app in Round 1, where the key was to demonstrate that you correctly handled bad input. We were amazed at the apps that were submitted for Round 2, where we asked developers to create an interesting app using one or more of several App Engine APIs. From making book recommendations to visualizing author impact on PubMed (a favorite of mine, my wife being an academic in medicine), we found many apps useful, well designed, and often quite elaborate.

– Patrick Chanezon, App Engine Developer Relations

Congratulations from the entire Google I/O team to the winners of all the challenges. The bar was quite high and even if you didn’t win, we hope you learned something while building your applications. We encourage you to hone your skills for challenges to come!