3D buildings in Google Maps for Android arise in London, Paris, Barcelona, and more

Last December, the release of Google Maps 5.0 for Android ushered in the next-generation of mobile maps where you can rotate, tilt, and zoom in and out of 3D maps. Whether you’re on the go or playing with a new phone, seeing a 3D skyline spring up in New York City, Zurich, Milan, and other cities is a helpful, fun, and unique experience–an experience we want as many of you as we can to have for your city.

We’ve been adding more cities and you will now find that 3D buildings are available in London, Paris, Barcelona, Stockholm, Singapore, Lisbon, Boulder, and 11 major cities in South Africa. 

3D buildings in London and Barcelona
You don’t need to update the app, just open Google Maps for mobile on your phone with Android 2.0+ and zoom in to a city with 3D buildings.

The SketchUp’s Shaderlight v2

A few great new items have been released to help make SketchUp an even more powerful product to use.

The first is the release of Shaderlight v2. Shaderlight it’s a great plugin that helps make your SketchUp models look amazingly realistic. With Shaderlight v2, it’s even better.

image-1b-shaderlight.png

You can read more about it on the Shadelight blog, or check out some videos of the new features on their YouTube channel.

The other interesting release is the PCB Converter plugin from RS Components. This plug-in can convert 2D circuit board designs from IDF to COLLADA, which SketchUp can then read and write.

IDF_Converter_1.jpg

For more about how this tool works, you can check out the Google SketchUp Blog or watch the short video below:

App Engine 1.5.3 SDK Released

 

New App Engine release. You might have noticed that the rate of releases has gone up slightly in the past few months. We’ve made some changes internally so we are looking to push out a new release every month. This month includes a few Datastore updates, some changes to Blobstore API and Memcache API, and finally a new feature for the Java developers.

Python and Java Changes

  • Blobstore API – We’ve removed the limits on the size of blob uploads. You can now upload files of any size, allowing your app to serve images, video, or anything your internet connection can handle.

Datastore Changes

  • Index retrieval – We’ve added the ability for you to programmatically retrieve the list of indexes you’ve currently defined in the datastore, as well as their statuses.
  • Datastore Admin – You can now enable the Datastore Admin function from the Admin Console. This will allow Java users to make use of this functionality, like deleting all entities of a certain kind, without having to upload a Python version of their application. And for Python developers, you no longer need to enable this in your app.yaml file.
  • HRD Migration Trusted Testers – We are seeking early adopters to try out an improved HRD migration tool that requires a read-only period relative to your datastore write rate (as opposed to your datastore size, which is how the current version behaves). Please see the release notes for more information.

Python Updates

  • Memcache API – We now support the CAS (compare-and-swap) operation in our Python Memcache API (Java already had it). This can be used to update a value in Memcache only if no other requests have updated it between when the value was retrieved and when you go to update it.

 

  • Download app – Using the AppCfg download_app command, you can download any files that were uploaded from your war directory when you last updated the app version.

This release also contains small updates and bugfixes for both Python and Java so be sure to check out the full release notes. Feedback, discussion, and questions can be posted in our Google Group.