Google Earth 6: Better Street View and 3D Trees

Google Earth 6: Better Street View and 3D Trees

Google Earth 6 doesn't have too many new features. You can now use Street View just like in Google Maps by dragging the pegman icon. "To view street-level imagery for a specific location, zoom into an area at an altitude of approximately 500km. You will see a pegman icon appear at the top right below the navigation controls. Click and drag the icon across the 3D viewer. A blue border will appear around roads that have street-level imagery available," explains Google.

Another new feature is the "3D Trees" layer that can be enabled from the "3D Buildings" section. Google Earth includes 3D models for city parks (San Francisco, Chicago, Tokio, Athens) and remote forests (Amazon Forest).

Historical imagery is now more accessible: just click on the date of the oldest imagery in the status bar and you'll be able to see all the historical images that are available for the same location.

Google Earth 6 also adds ground-level navigation that lets you explore 3D buildings and 3D trees, 3D measurements for heights and widths of buildings and a much better Tour Recorder that improves motion fidelity.

Google SSL Secure Search

Google SSL Secure Search

With Google search over SSL, you can have an end-to-end encrypted search solution between your computer and Google. This secured channel helps protect your search terms and your search results pages from being intercepted by a third party. This provides you with a more secure and private search experience.

To use search over SSL, visit https://encrypted.google.com each time you perform a search. Note that only Google web search is available over SSL, so other search products like Google Images and Google Maps are not currently available over SSL. When you're searching over SSL, these properties may not appear in the left panel.

What is SSL?
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a protocol that helps provide secure Internet communications for services like web browsing, e-mail, instant messaging, and other data transfers. When you search over SSL, your search queries and search traffic are encrypted so they can't be read by any intermediary party such as employers and internet service providers (ISPs).

Coming Soon in Google Docs: Third Party Apps, Cloud Printing and Sync

Coming Soon in Google Docs: Third Party Apps, Cloud Printing and Sync

Google Docs' source code includes a message that reveals some important upcoming features: "Coming soon: Third party applications, cloud printers, and sync devices".

Cloud printing is a project that will enable applications on any device to print documents. "This goal is accomplished through the use of a cloud print service. Apps no longer rely on the local operating system (and drivers) to print. Instead, apps (whether they be a native desktop/mobile app or a web app) use Google Cloud Print to submit and manage print jobs." Google says that printers "are treated in much the same way as documents are in Google Docs". Cloud Print will be implemented in Google Chrome and Google Chrome OS, so it will probably launched in the coming weeks.

If you can synchronize your calendar, your contacts or your mail, why not synchronize the documents stored in Google Docs? That's one of the most important missing features from Google Docs. Google already offers some APIs for uploading and downloading files, but they're limited to documents, spreadsheets and presentations if you don't use Google Apps Premier Edition.

Google Docs has applications for editing documents, spreadsheets, presentations and for viewing PDF files, but what about other file types? There's no photo editor, no video editor, no application for editing PDF files or for extracting files from archives. Third party applications could solve some of these issues and make Google Docs even more useful.