YouTube 2.1 App Now Available on Android Market

When you’re watching a video on YouTube, how often do you JUST watch the video? If you’re like me, you scroll down, maybe read the video description and glance over at the related videos to choose what you might watch next.
Today the latest YouTube app, version 2.1, is available on the Android Market, so YouTube app updates aren’t tied to Android OS releases anymore. The app was rebuilt from the ground up to mirror the YouTube desktop experience and is our fastest, most intuitive YouTube mobile app to date.
What’s new:

  • In-page playback: you can read the video description, browse related, rate or flag videos without having to interrupt video playback.
  • Posting comments: you can post a comment while the video is playing, just like on the desktop website.
  • Subscription updates: we’ve made it easier to access new videos from your subscriptions. If you are signed into your account, you will see all your subscription updates right on the home screen of the app.
  • New full-screen UI: To enter full-screen mode simply rotate the phone. The new player controls make it easier to seek within the video, and you can pause or resume the playback by just tapping on the screen.

Following our famous mantra ‘launch early, iterate often’, we first released an early version of the unbundled app a few of weeks ago, collected user feedback, and addressed the key user requests in version 2.1.

Please note that the new YouTube app only works on devices running Android 2.2. To install it, search for ‘YouTube’ in Android Market. It also comes pre-installed on many upcoming Android 2.3 devices, such as the Nexus S.

Posted by Andrey Doronichev, YouTube Mobile Product Manager, recently watched “Huge Bike Jump into a Pond 35 feet in the air“

Our first Google Geo Developer series is over…but the YouTubes will last a lifetime!

Posted by Pamela Fox, Maps API Team

Two months ago, we announced the start of the Google Geo Developer series on this blog. The point of the series was to bring together local geo developers for intimate talks/discussions around Maps/KML topics, and then let all developers watch the events on YouTube. It was a bit of an experiment – would we find enough topics for talks every week? Would anyone watch the videos? Well, I’m happy to say it was a successful experiment. Besides having 6 great talks and more than 20,000 YouTube video views, we also met a bunch of local developers working on geo projects (thanks for always showing up, you guys), and even met some folks from far away through the mailing list. Hopefully we’ll get to hold another of these series in the falls, so subscribe to the mailing list if you want to find out about future events.

Here’s a roundup of the talks that went down, with links to videos. Click “More info” on the YouTube description and you’ll often find a link to slides/materials.

  • Quick & Dirty KML Creation: With Mano Marks, Pamela Fox, and Christiaan Adams

    A demonstration of creating KML visually in Google Earth & Google Maps, and using Spreadsheet Mapper 2.0
  • Creating Custom Maps: With John Coryat

    A comparison of various ways of overlaying data in the Maps API and an in-depth explanation of creating tile layers and custom map types
  • GigaPan In-Depth: With Randy Sargent & Ted Morse

    A demo of the GigaPan panorama-browsing website and KML files, plus a technical explanation of PhotoOverlay
  • Dynamic KML: With Mano Marks & Brian Hamlin

    An exploration of using dynamic queries from KML, using the NetworkLink, httpQuery, and viewFormat elements, plus a demo of a PostGIS-generated NetworkLink
  • Mars, Moon, and Sky Map Types: With Noel Gorelick

    A talk introducing the non-Earth Maps API map types, plus cool demos of other types of projections used with planetary imagery
  • Mapping the Votes: With Michael Geary

    A whirlwind tour of what it took to create the Elections 2008 Map/Mapplet/Gadget, including SHPfile conversion, Javascript optimization, centroid calculations, Twitter updates collection, Mapplet API tricks, and more.
  • Google API Talks – Android, KML, Google Maps, Gadgets

    A series of 5-minute talks by various developers and Googlers given before Geary’s presentation, including an intro to Gadgets/Mapplets.

US Navy Flight Week in Google Earth

Back in October, Chris Yonge of Studio Cruz and Christiaan Adams created a very cool Google Earth Tour for the San Francisco Fleet Week. The tour includes a voice overlay, images, video and more, all in one nice package.

To view the tour, you can download this KMZ file or simply watch the YouTube video below:

Because of the complexity of the tour, Chris and Chritiaan wrote up the following information on how they came up with the idea for the Tour, as well as how they were able to put it together technically. Hopefully this information is helpful if you plan to build a similar Tour for a project of your own.

This project emerged from a desire to help Fleet Week 2010 showcase its mission using a 3D animated tour in Google Earth.  Studio Cruz was recommended by the Google Earth team, and was chosen as the developer, after having produced other successful Google Earth tours, including one for Potter Drilling of Redwood City, CA in 2009, which was showcased at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference.  Studio Cruz worked with the Fleet Week organizers to create the seven minute tour in advance of the Navy and Marines’ Fleet Week celebration in early October 2010.  The timescale was tight – only five weeks – but since no complex coding was involved it was judged possible.

The tour had three goals: to introduce the concept of Fleet Week to the public, to explain the serious purpose behind the public events (liaison between Navy and civilian disaster relief specialists), and to provide a brief history of the US Navy’s disaster relief work in the SF area and around the world. The script directed that the tour be graphics intensive, including four YouTube videos, interactive balloons, screen overlay animation, a live link to an existing online KMZ history of Bay Area earthquakes on a USGS site, and precisely synchronized professional narration.

Studio Cruz began work on the tour in early September. The YouTube videos were downloaded as Flash videos using RealPlayer, trimmed to the relevant sections using Moyea FLV Editor, then uploaded as new videos ready for embedding into the relevant parts of the tour. The script was split into 45 sections of between one and three sentences, and placeholder MP3s were created in the studio. These were later replaced by the professional narration. Photographs provided by the Navy were cropped and resaved as JPGs, and screen/ground overlays were built in Photoshop and saved out as 24-bit PNG files.

Building the tour took slightly over a week, with coding and graphics being made by Chris Yonge, principal of Studio Cruz. Since Google intended the tour to be revised and reused for future Fleet Weeks the KML code was extensively commented, down to the words spoken in each piece of narration. After the build stage, the placeholder narration audio files were replaced with the final professional versions. This required minor timing adjustments throughout the tour, but once that was done the tour was delivered and posted.

Google also wanted a video version of the tour for visitors to the Fleet Week site who did not have Google Earth. For clarity and quality this was done using the screen capture program Camtasia; the resulting AVI files were assembled in AfterEffects and adjusted. However, some parts of the tour did not capture well: in particular the slowdown caused by Camtasia operating in the background meant there was an unacceptable pause before the YouTube videos started. The decision was made, a few days before the deadline, to rewrite the tour specifically for the video capture. Animation, video, narration, and interactive balloons were removed from the KML file. The reduced tour was run and captured as a video in Camtasia, and the resulting files imported into AfterEffects. The removed items were then replaced as individual layers, resulting in much higher quality. The raw animation was around 14 Gb, which was compressed to 700 Mb for uploading to YouTube. It can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le5GqmV6ASg.

Both the tour and video were completed on time and to budget. The video alone had over nine thousand views the first weekend. Studio Cruz can be found at www.studiocruz.com.