Earthware Blog

Those of you who have downloaded and tried Googles latest beta release of Google Earth will notice it’s had a large redesign of its look and feel.

Today I found a very helpful resource that details the new user interface so I thought I’d share it here (click below to see the full image)

Had some bits I hadn’t noticed too.

Over the last few weeks we have been busy finishing of various demos including our upcomming uk cinemas demo. During development we’ve come across a few ‘issues’ with writing KML an KMZ files to the users browser from an .aspx page using the “Content-Disposition” HTTP Header that I thought it would be helpful to share with other .Net Google Earth developers who may come acrross the same problems.

ALL the problems are due to Internet explorer! Firefox works perfectly all the time It seems I suffers from a number of problems, our specific ones being:

1. IE often has problems honouring AddHeader(“Content-Disposition”,”attachment; filename=myfile.kmz”) and instead prompts the user to open a file called the same as the .aspx page they are on.
2. IE also has problems actually downloading the file once you have the filename comming up ok, complaining about not being able to contact the internet site. Bizarely the page works fine it you follow a link to it from another page, but not if your enter the url directly into the address bar?

Both solutions in the end were simple, but not obvious

1. If, just like us, you have IIS setup to compress all .aspx files (Gzip compression) then each .aspx request has a header “Content-Encoding: gzip” that IIS adds for you. Unfortunatly IE then ignores your “Content-Disposition” header, so to fix it add Response.AppendHeader(“Content-Encoding”, “none;”) and then it works!
2. This one is even simplier, but we have not idea why this works. Just add Response.ClearHeaders() and the file will work properly from a direct url

So other than now having a bigger hate for IE, its all working. We hope to have some of the first demos live soon.

Google have released an updated beta to Google Earth for mac, windows and linux.

The new version has these fixes:

• Language selection can now be done from the Options/Preferences under the “General” tab. Choices are English, Spanish, French, Italian, and German.
• You can now choose which way the mouse-wheel zooms under the “Navigation” tab in the options (hurray!)
• Improved memory management, does not require as much memory
• Automatic setting of memory cache based on machine RAM (improves performance)
• Fix to a problem where search/layer/places panes were missing if you had them turned off in GE 3 (I had that problem with my Mac version)

You can see more details about the new beta at the Google Earth 4 Beta Page.
The new beta supports lots of great features like 3D textured buildings, which we will be offering as a solution for Architectural Projects and property developers to show planned buildings. Imagine showing your new housing project in google earth with all the surrounding satellite imagery!

We are developers of Geospacial software, especially focusing on Google Earth, Google Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth and other internet related satellite mapping applications.

Earthware is currently in the setup phase, finishing some of our new systems and making some example application ready for the site launch.

We decided to start a blog as a way for the comminity to follow our progress and development as well as to share new ideas, code samples, general mapping news and the odd bit of fun here and there.

For more information please visit our main website.

Now we are starting to get things in place here at Earthware.co.uk I thought it was time to start a blog so that we can keep you updated on all the latest news and developments.

We are in the middle of finishing our first few real-world examples for Google Earth solutions as well as sorting out the website and corporate identity, so no sleep for me.

Over the next few months we will gradually start to build up all our examples of solutions using a range of mapping tools including Google Earth, Google Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth and Mappoint.

There will also be some general articles about the technologies we are using and the challenges we overcome, so hopefully something of interest to all the mapping community.

That’s all for now, come back soon!