planetinaction.com: Animated Bitmaps in Google Earth

 

Paul van Dinther has done a lot of cool stuff with Google Earth, including putting out the excellent game “Ships” and “Drive the A-Team Van“, among others. He has also done a good bit of work in building and testing new ideas to stretch the Google Earth Plug-in to its limits. He recently built a tool to test the performance of the plug-in in various browsers, and now he’s back with a neat demo to show how to render text and animated bitmaps using the plug-in.

 

explosions.jpg 

You can try it for yourself on his site. As he mentions on there, you’ll likely get better performance out of it if you use Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer with the demo, as Google Chrome has some speed issues when working with the Google Earth Plug-in.

Rain Alarm Map

Rain Alarm Map


Rain Alarm Map

Get live alerts for incoming rain or snow.

The simple idea of this web map and app is to warn you against approaching precipitation like rain or snow. Therefore the app checks in a perimeter of 75 km / 47 miles every 30 minutes, if there is something approaching. Simply leave the page open in the background and you’ll get notified.

Note that the map is refreshed automatically so you do not have to reload the page. The buttons on the bottom right en- or disable the animation and the alarm functionality.

The data used originates from governmental weather services and is available for the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK, Ireland, Norway, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain including the Balearic and the Canary Islands.

Browsers:
The alarm notifications work best with Google Chrome. For Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer the alarms work as well, though they are not as pretty and intuitive.

With some browsers your location can be determined automatically or otherwise a rough estimate is used. To correct your location, simply drag the marker to be able to receive correct alarms.

Internet Explorer
You need to keep Rain Alarm as the active tab to be able to receive alarm notifications even when the Internet Explorer is minimized.

Mobile

The app is also available for Android as well as iOS.

Map:
http://www.rain-alarm.com/

Google Chrome continues to increase it’s market share

Google Chrome browser continues to increase its market share: according to a recent report of the company Net Applications, in November, the share of Google Chrome reached 9.27 percent of the total market for Web browsers. For one month it has increased by 0.77%.Experts say the growing popularity of Chrome is monitored by the decline in popularity of other browsers, in particular, the share of Microsoft Internet Explorer (all versions) from October to November fell from 59.18% to 58.41%, while the share of Mozilla Firefox (all versions) decreased from 22.83% to 22.81%.

The report of Net Applications says that for the month of the big five web browser has increased its share Apple Safari – from 5.36% in October to 5.57 percent in November.

Some versions of browsers became leader in November Chrome 7, which leads most popular Firefox 3.6. In February 2010 the share of the browser has risen to 5.64 percent, but Chrome for November 7 only has gained 6.09 percent.In part, this growth from Net Applications attributed to the growth of the mobile versions of Chrome, which comes with the system Android and will be sold with future versions of OS ChromeOS, which is still in test mode by Google.