Google + Keyhole = Google Earth







Google just released the next version of their Keyhole software. It's called Google Earth, and of course it's a beta release.

New Features
Geocoder, Local Search, and Driving Directions are now integrated with Google's search engine. The last 10 search entries are remembered.
3D buildings are or will be available in 39 US cities, try San Francisco!
Draw Line and Draw Polygon are now available, including extruded and at-altitude items.
You can "drive to" and "drive from" any placemark, icon, or MyPlaces entry using the right-click context menu.
Search Results and MyPlaces now have a "snippet view," showing the first two lines of the description.
GPS data can now be viewed in Google Earth, either directly input from Garmin/Magellan devices (including Garmin USB interface), or by using .gpx or .loc file loading.
Streaming performance (updating data via the network) should be greatly improved. Server infrastructure at Google helps, but the software has also changed to take advantage of it.
A new filetype, KMZ, is available. KMZ files are KML files that have been zipped up along with their related files, such as image overlays. This means that you can share image overlays and custom icons without having to publish the files on an external web server or mail them as an attachment with the KML.
Style Templates can now be applied to "Import..." data and existing KML folders.
You can perform batch geocoding of street addresses using the Import menu item to import a .csv (comma-separated values) file
More flexible tour mode: touring a line (e.g., the route from driving directions) or touring a folder is now possible. Folder tours allow items to be checkboxed visible, but not be included in the tour path by limiting tour points to only one folder (checked or not).
The description now appears in an on-screen balloon instead of in the side window.
Web page results from search and URLs embedded in description can now be viewed in an embedded web browser (or, via options/preferences, in an external browser)
Rolling over an icon highlights the label.
You can now select lines and polygons. Use ctrl+leftclick to select/get-balloon-description. Use ctrl+rightclick to get the context menu (which will allow editing).
A new Latitude/Longitude grid is available.
Significant speed improvements in High-resolution Printing and Movie Making.
Double-click in the 3D view to point-n-zoom: The old single-click point-n-zoom mode has been moved to the options/preferences panel, but double-click on the earth and you will zoom in to that point.
The transparency slider now appears only when an image overlay is selected
Improved rendering performance.
Icons and lines can now be displayed at altitude. Icons at altitude and have a "stem" connecting them to the ground.
Polygons can be extruded or displayed at altitude.
GIFs (non-animated) can be used as overlays and icons.
ICO (.ico) files can used as icons.
Folder open-state is now remembered.
Layer-enables (eg: terrain, lodging, earthquakes) are remembered between runs of the software.
Measure mode now optionally disables mouse navigation to simplify the task.
Movies can be saved as sequences of image files.
Movie Maker now has a 25/50 Frames-per-second (fps) option.
Google Earth can now be installed without administrative privileges (Plus only).
The installer now has option in to specify the install directory.
After installation, re-run the install and use the "modify" option to change the location Google Earth uses to store cache.dat and myplaces.kml.
The "High Res Places" and "World Places" menus have been removed and a small sight-seeing list has moved to the default_myplaces.kml file. As you will see, tracking the high-resolution places in new Google Earth data has gone beyond the list stage.
New mouse controls for tilt and rotate. These controls are accessed by pressing down on the scroll wheel (or middle mouse button). To tilt the camera, hold the scroll wheel down while moving the mouse up and down. To rotate the camera, hold the scroll wheel down while moving the mouse left and right. To rotate without tilting (e.g. to do a 360 degree rotation), hold the shift key and scroll wheel down while moving the mouse in a circular motion around the center of the screen.
a new/old G-force mode has been added to navigation. Use leftmouse/rightmouse for acceleration/deceleration. Set it in Tools/Options/Control or use ctrl-G, ctrl-T, and ctrl-Z to switch between navigation modes.
KML additions/changes:
<KML> the KML parent tag has been added to allow versioning of KML. It will prevent old clients from loading new KML.
<open> tag for remembering open state of folders
<LookAt>, a replacement for the <View> that handles terrain correctly. Keyhole 2.2's <View> will continue to load and render correctly in 3.0, but is deprecated
{Style changes}, styles have been rewritten to make attributes orthogonal between icon, line, and polygons. Old 2.2 styles are deprecated but will continue to work in this release.
<ADDRESS>, allows KML to specify location by address instead of lat/long. When the Google Earth client loads this KML, it will try to geocode the item. Failed items will be geocoded to [0,0] to avoid hitting the geocoder on subsequent loads.
<SNIPPET>, allows the snippet-view text to be different than the description. Useful for supplying an abbreviated description.
{screen space overlays}, the syntax has changed and some 2.2 overlays may not work. Because these were a hidden feature, backwards compatibility was not handled.
Fixes:
In rare cases, Google Earth would crash on exit while saving MyPlaces and lose either the session data or the whole file. Many changes have been made to better protect against this situation, including a more reliable backup mechanism.
Entries in MyPlaces will no longer occasionally be re-ordered during a exit/restart.
Road labels are now drawn in higher quantity at low altitude.
Shared display styles from an imported folder can now be disabled by moving their contents into new folders and applying a new shared display style.
Labels in prints are no longer truncated.
Overlay images now retain their aspect ratio when imported.
Google Earth now works with Windows Server 2003
Multiple image overlays loaded simultaneously no longer sporadically fail to load.
Network link refresh will no longer sporadically fail and need to be manually restarted.

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