The Garmin Forerunner 110 GPS watch is the easiest-to-use GPS watch in history. Sccurately track your speed and distance plus download your information to Google Maps. This is the coolest new GPS product in a long time.
Page Speed Online, with mobile support
At Google, striving to make the whole web fast. As part of that effort, we’re launching a new web-based tool in Google Labs, Page Speed Online, which analyzes the performance of web pages and gives specific suggestions for making them faster. Page Speed Online is available from any browser, at any time. This allows website owners to get immediate access to Page Speed performance suggestions so they can make their pages faster.
In addition, we’ve added a new feature: the ability to get Page Speed suggestions customized for the mobile version of a page, specifically smartphones. Due to the relatively limited CPU capabilities of mobile devices, the high round-trip times of mobile networks, and rapid growth of mobile usage, understanding and optimizing for mobile performance is even more critical than for the desktop, so Page Speed Online now allows you to easily analyze and optimize your site for mobile performance. The mobile recommendations are tuned for the unique characteristics of mobile devices, and contain several best practices that go beyond the recommendations for desktop browsers, in order to create a faster mobile experience. New mobile-targeted best practices include eliminating uncacheable landing page redirects and reducing the amount of JavaScript parsed during the page load, two common issues that slow down mobile pages today.
Page Speed Online is powered by the same Page Speed SDK that powers the Chrome and Firefox extensions and webpagetest.org.
Please give Page Speed Online a try. We’re eager to hear your feedback on our mailing list and find out how you’re using it to optimize your site.
Help with spherical geometry from our first Maps API library
The Maps API v3 aims to minimise the time it takes to load and display the initial map. Indeed the architectural changes needed to reduce this delay on mobile devices were the primary motivation for the break from the Maps API v2. The biggest factor affecting load time is the size of the JavaScript, as both the speed at which this is downloaded, and the speed it is parsed before execution by browsers is directly related to its size.
As the Maps API v3 continues to evolve we are keen to add more features, but as we do so we must be mindful of the impact they have on the size of the API. In response to this constraint we are kicking off 2011 by introducing a new concept to the Maps API v3, called a library.
A library is a set of Maps API features that are only loaded when explicitly requested by the application. By packaging features into a library, we can deliver them to applications that need those features without penalising the loading times of applications that do not. A library has its own child namespace under google.maps, and is a fully supported component of the Maps API.
The first library that we are launching is the geometry library. The geometry library provides a set of utility functions for performing distance, heading, and area calculations in a spherical geometry, such as on the surface of the Earth, and also provides functions for handling encoded polylines. To use these functions in your Maps API application you must request the geometry library when loading the API.
For more information on the geometry library, see the Maps API Documentation and Reference. If you think of additional spherical geometry functions you would like to see added to the geometry library, please log a feature request on the Maps API Issue Tracker. If you have any questions about using the geometry library, the Maps API v3 Forum is a great place to find help.