Google Reader offers Offline Mode!
Finally! What all RSS readers have been waiting for! Google is now offering an offline version of Google Reader. You’ll now see a “Go Offline” link on the top right that, when clicked, prompts you to install Google Gears. Gears is an open source extension to the browser that lets you store and serve data locally as well as housing data in its own internal relational database. You simply go to a page that is configured to use Gears and give Gears permission to run content on that domain name. This also means offline Gmail, Gdocs, and Gcal!
Google Reader on the Wii
It seems those crazy Googlers have done it again. Yesterday on the Google Reader blog, Mihai Parparita posted about his experience using Google Reader in the Wii’s Opera-based “internet channel”. In his words:
As I was recovering from Wii elbow, I began to explore the capabilities of the Opera-based Internet Channel. It occurred that Reader may be a lot of fun on the Wii, especially with many photo and video feeds.
So naturally Mihai and his crack dev team went into their coding cave and emerged with a version of the Google Reader web app modified for the Wii Internet Channel. It even integrates with Wiimote controls:
- up/down: scroll up/down
- right/left: next/previous item
- 1 button: show subscriptions
- 2 button: show links
When showing subscriptions:
- up/down: previous/next subscription
- right: select current subscription
- left: close
- -/+: collapse/expand folder
Check this out if you want to see a demo of what the Wii GReader interface looks like. Google Reader just keeps getting better. Oh and here’s his demo video:
via Official Google Reader Blog
New Google Analytics Design On the Way
I just noticed a post by Jeff Veen of Google detailing a complete redesign of the Google Analytics UI. Looking at the feature tour, it looks pretty impressive and is a welcome change to the existing interface. The new UI incorporates some features that are very similar to the rich Flash-based data and graphing tool they have on Google Finance (sample). The new dashboard looks like it’ll be far more user-friendly, particularly for end users in marketing, business development, and management, but also even for us people in IT who hate digging around for web traffic/conversion data in a complicated UI. There will be better chart and graph views for your primary market areas as well as AdWords campaigns or keywords. I’ve been using Analytics a good bit lately to get deeper into the SEO and traffic optimization stuff for my company (as well as my personal websites), but this new interface looks like I could even get the non-geek involved in the more technical aspects of the development of our company. Google has posted a Flash demo of the new features of Analytics.
Google Analytics is a derivative product of Urchin Software’s Urchin On Demand system. Urchin was acquired by Google in the Spring of 2005.
Nautical Info from Google Maps
I just ran across a great Google Maps mashup for any sort of marine enthusiast. Someone has thrown together a site where you can view tide data, sunrise/sunsets, weather, and satellite imagery all on the same page for any location you ask for. You pass it a city, zip code, or latitude and longitude (DMS or decimal degrees) and it spits out a map with all the relevant tide data from local NOAA or USCG stations. Really neat for that fisherman inside all of us.
Buildings!
Google has updated the regular “Maps” view of Google Maps with 2.5D imagery of buildings and features in some cities. Yet another reason why Google Maps is the way to go. I can now view buildings I recognize without having to toggle to the Satellite or Hybrid views (the quality of which is sometimes too poor to make out features). Here’s a sample:
Google Launches My Maps
Yesterday Google announced what I think is the best feature of Google Maps to date. It’s called My Maps, and it allows you to place your own placemarks, draw your own lines and polygons, place videos, and embed text, all georeferenced and placed interactively on the map. It also generates a public URL for every map for easy sharing. You can even change the colors and annotate your drawings.
The first noticeable difference is the inclusion of a My Maps tab on your sidebar. And like most Google products, you can choose to share your creation or keep it private/unlisted.
Creating your own points, lines, and polygons is all done through a simple drag and drop interface. After you’ve added features, any of them can include a description in plain text, rich text (with a neat little GUI editor), or HTML. This of course will allow users to easily add Flickr photos, Youtube videos, Wikipedia entries… the possibilities are endless. You can also get directions to and from any placemark you put on the map. I’ve been waiting for that feature for a long time now.
A simple table of contents will also give you a breakdown of all your features, which is nice considering you could create a humongous mashup with these new features.
One of the nicest features to highlight, however, is the ability to export anything you draw into KML format. This of course allows you to add your data to Google Earth, or one of the many emerging or existing products that are providing KML support.
My Maps adds to the growing list of interesting features that Google has recently added to Google Maps. Other features like traffic, GeoRSS support, and the click to call feature for phone numbers have all added a good deal of functionality to an already great product. If they keep on their current trajectory, Google’s on pace to dominate the geospatial technology market, at least for the general consumer/prosumer.
Marine Charts for Google Earth
A company called EarthNC is now providing a CD with 600 NOAA ENC charts and 70 Army Corps of Engineers Inland charts. NOAA’s nautical chart data is provided for free electronically and EarthNC has translated it into an intelligent KML format to be used as a Google Earth overlay. The screenshots look pretty interesting:
Depth Soundings
Vector Data and Intelligent Zooming
Google Earth has really become a powerful tool, even for marine use. With a small laptop or portable computer and a cheap GPS (and an EVDO card if you’re feeling saucy), fisherman, sailors, and recreational boaters can create an advanced data storage and tracking system for themselves. One could store anything from good fishing spots to sailing routes to nice island campsites. And with something like EarthNC’s product, your nautical charts could be obsolete (and we all hate handling unwieldy and sometimes non-waterproof charts on a trip, especially in the rain). I hope that Google, DigitalGlobe, TerraXplorer and other imagery vendors get more into the marine imaging arena. There’s some crude bathymetry data on Google Earth, but for inland imaging, they could do better. This is a very compelling product. It’s nice to see folks really adopting the KML format and doing amazing things with it.
New Google Earth Imagery
Last week Google released a slew of new imagery, much of it hi-res. They’ve also updated and corrected some imagery problems. Here are the details:
New hi resolution:
- Canada: Downtown Vancouver, BC
- England: Northamptonshire, Nottingshire, Berkeshire, Peakdistrict, Birmingham, Greater Manchester, Avon, Gloucestershire, Linconshire
- France: Rennes, Poitiers
- US: Omaha, NE; Missoula, MT; Amherst, MA; Keowee, SC; Catawba Wateree, NC/SC; Rolla, MO; Nashville (”Burbia”), TN; Gaston County, NC; Anne Arundel County, Metro Water District of Southern California; State of Arkansas
Updated imagery:
- Spain: Gran Canaria, Fuerteventura, El Hierro, La Gomera, Tenerife, and Las Palmas (Canary Islands) Spain
- US: Austin, TX; San Bernardino, CA; State of Connecticut, Greater Los Angeles Area, CA
- Australia: Sydney harbor area
Fixes:
- Danish plane replicants removed (read more)
- Andes, Machu Picchu terrain repaired
Google Reader
I think I may have just made the switch to Google Reader yesterday… for good. I’d been using the combination of NetNewsWire (on my MacBook) and Newsgator Online, primarily for the synching features. However, I was playing around with the revamped Google Reader last night and I’ll have to say, it’s the best I’ve used. The downside to all the other online readers I’ve used (i.e. Rojo, Newsgator, Attensa, FeedLounge, et cetera) was first and foremost speed. Google Reader is fast, easy to use, and one of my favorite features is the simplicity of browsing for feeds. Another neat feature is the ability to “share” links inside the Reader and add this data via a widget-like box to your own website. Also, other readers seem to have a hard time indexing popular RSS sources… at least for my taste. I tend to keep my reader limited to real publications (blogs and news sites) and a few other sources, I don’t like cluttering it up with data feeds from random other places, such as Digg, Flickr, and others.
Another standout feature of the new Google Reader is the introduction of keyboard shortcuts. The more it seems like a desktop application, the more I like it. Automatically. One negative point to most web-apps, however, is the ever-growing need for internet connectivity everywhere. Most web-app substitutes for desktop apps fall short when you’d like to work on a document offline, like Zoho and Writely. But in the case of a feed reader (short of having a zillion feeds you haven’t read in a while), synching and taking that feed data with you offline really isn’t that important. Bottom line, this new reader is great and hopefully it gets even better.
Writely and Google Spreadsheets Invitations
If you want to try out these two latest “Google Office” products, head over to this site. This person is apparently offering invites to anyone manly enough to give out their email address at random. 
This is interesting, however, considering both of these services have been closed to new user registration for a long time (Writely since they were acquired by Google in early March, and I think Google Spreadsheets was only open to beta testers for a few days) And Adam from Lifehacker says he tested this and got his invite in an hour!
As an aside, I also have accounts for both of these… so if I know you, maybe I’ll send you an invite.
[Via Lifehacker]