Sun Surveyor brings augmented reality to photographers using Google Maps APIs

Posted by Adam Ratana, Developer of Sun Surveyor

(Cross-posted on the Geo Developers Blog.)

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Adam Ratana, developer of Sun Surveyor. Read how Sun Surveyor is using Google Maps APIs to help photographers capture the perfect photo.

I’m a photography enthusiast, and I’m always looking for ways to improve my work. That’s what led me to develop Sun Surveyor, an iOS and Android app that uses Google Maps APIs to visualize the location of the sun and the moon anywhere in the world. The app makes it easy to figure out when the natural lighting will be just right — and get the ideal shot.

Sun Surveyor uses augmented reality to overlay the paths of the sun and moon on a camera’s view, so you can see where in the sky they’ll be at a specific time and place. Photographers can use it to plan their shots ahead of time, and businesses can use it to gauge things like how best to align solar panels to make the most efficient use of the angle of the sun.

The app uses multiple Google Maps APIs, including the Elevation API, the Time Zone API, the Google Maps SDK for iOS and the Google Maps Android API. The Android API, which includes Street View, was particularly helpful. It allowed me to overlay the path of the sun and moon on any Street View location anywhere in the world. For programming details, see this blog post.

The following screen captures give you a sense of how the app works. They show overlays on top of the iconic Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. The first shows the paths of the sun (yellow line) and moon (blue line) over an aerial view of Yosemite Valley. The green line shows the distance between the photographer and the object to be photographed — in this case, Half Dome.

This next screen capture shows how the app looks when in Street View mode. Again, the yellow line shows the sun’s path, and the blue line shows the moon’s path. The green line represents the horizon. You can see how the app lets you plan the right time to get a shot of the sun behind Half Dome: in this particular instance, 8:06 am.

Nearly 500,000 people around the world have downloaded the free version of Sun Surveyor, and many have paid for the full edition. They’re taking remarkable photos as a result, and what started as a hobby for me has turned into a business — thanks to Google Maps APIs.

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Saving a life through technology Coffee with a Googler

Posted by Laurence Moroney, Developer Advocate

In this week’s Coffee with a Googler, we’re joined by Heidi Dohse from the Google Cloud team to talk about how she saved her own life through technology. At Google she works on the Cloud Platform team that supports our genomics work, and has a passion for the future of the delivery of health care.

When she was a child, Heidi Dohse had an erratic heartbeat, but, without knowing anything about it, she just ignored it. As a teen she became a competitive windsurfer and skier, and as part of a surgery on her knee between seasons, she had an EKG and discovered that her heart was beating irregularly at 270bpm.

She had an experimental surgery and was immediately given a pacemaker, and became a young heart patient, expecting not to live much longer. Years later, Heidi is now on her 7th pacemaker, but it doesn’t stop her from staying active as an athlete. She’s a competitive cyclist, often racing hundreds of miles, and climbing tens of thousands of feet as she races.

At the core of all this is her use of technology. She has carefully managed her health by collecting and analyzing the data from her pacemaker. The data goes beyond just heartbeat, and includes things such as the gyroscope, oxygen utilization, muscle stimulation and electrical impulses, she can pro-actively manage her health.

It’s the future of health care -- instead of seeing a doctor for an EKG every few months, with this technology and other wearables, one can constantly check their health data, and know ahead of time if there would be any health issues. One can proactively ensure their health, and pre-empt any health issues.

Learn more in the video.

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How to check if the phone is connected to the Internet

to check whether your phone is connected to the Internet, use the following code:

ConnectivityManager con=(ConnectivityManager)getSystemService(Activity.CONNECTIVITY_SERVICE);
 boolean wifi=con.getNetworkInfo(ConnectivityManager.TYPE_WIFI).isConnectedOrConnecting();
 boolean internet=con.getNetworkInfo(ConnectivityManager.TYPE_MOBILE).isConnectedOrConnecting();

these lines check for internet connection whether it is through WiFi or Mobile Internet.

you need to add the following permission to the AndroidManifest.xml file

<uses-permission android_name="android.permission.ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE" />

Another method is what our freind Kevin mentioned in the comments, is to check if a certain website is reachable or not like this:

public static boolean isOnline() {
try {
InetAddress.getByName("google.ca").isReachable(3);
return true;
} catch (UnknownHostException e){
return false;
} catch (IOException e){
return false;
}
}

we check if a site is reachable within a certain timeout or not.

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Lyft connects drivers and riders with Google Maps APIs

Posted by Vishay Nihalani, Product Manager, Lyft

(Cross-posted on the Google Geo Developers Blog.)

Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is Vishay Nihalani, Product Manager at the ride-sharing service Lyft. Read how Lyft uses Google Maps APIs to help riders save money and get to their destinations faster. Lyft is one of many customers sharing their story as part of our cross-country road trip, Code the Road.

We know a lot about road trips—people have taken tens of millions of rides with us from the steep hills of San Francisco to the city streets of Chicago. Ride-sharing today is an intensely competitive business. If you’re going to succeed, you’ve got to connect riders and drivers simply and conveniently and make the experience delightful from beginning to end. That’s why we chose Google Maps and the Google Maps APIs. We started using them with our internal operations tools, and when we saw how valuable and scalable they were, we worked with Google to launch their services in our customer-facing apps.

The Google Maps Android API creates our Android app’s main interface—it’s the map you see when users log in. Our users can drop pins on a map or enter their location manually to indicate pick-up and drop-off locations. Through reverse geocoding, the app will recognize locations and determine an address automatically based on where the pin is dropped. We also help people find their locations by using the Google Places Search API. People often think about the places they want to go by name—for example, they’ll enter “Cliff House” rather than the restaurant’s street address. The Google Places Search API allows a passenger to enter the name of a destination.

When customers use our app, they expect there’ll be a car waiting for them and they’ll get to their destination as quickly as possible. They need to know when they’ll be picked up and when they’ll get where they want to go. We make it easy for our riders to quickly see this information right in the app.

Lyft now has more than 100,000 drivers and delivers more than two million rides per month in 65 cities. We’ve seen more than 500% growth in rides and revenue since last year, thanks in large part to Google Maps. And we’re exploring ways to make Lyft even better by using maps to improve the ride options we offer—for example, by expanding our new Lyft Line option for riders going in the same direction.

Google has been a great partner and has really contributed to our success, so we’re pleased to participate in Code the Road as Google celebrates mapping innovation and fun on its trip across America. Kyle Madsen, Android Developer at Lyft, presented at the Chicago developer meetup on June 9th. It was a great crowd and an exciting event. We hope to see you on the road!

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Retirement of certain Google search APIs

Posted by Vijay Subramani, Technical Program Manager, Google Cloud Platform

Back in 2011, we announced the deprecation of the following APIs: Google Patent Search API, Google News Search API, Google Blog Search API, Google Video Search API, Google Image Search API. We supported these APIs for a three year period (and beyond), but as all things come to an end, so has the deprecation window for these APIs.

We are now announcing the turndown of the above APIs. These APIs will cease operations on February 15, 2016.

You may wish to look at our Custom Search API as an alternative for these APIs.

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Keep all of your work more secure with Google Drive

Posted by: Scott Johnston, Director of Product Management, Google Drive

Since we launched Drive for Work 9 months ago, weve watched as more and more businesses moved to the cloud — and seen that they prioritize data security as much as we do. Security ranks at the top of the list of concerns that companies have about moving to the cloud, which is why we’ve put security front and center in our products from the beginning. And to keep your company’s data even more secure in Drive, we’re launching new sharing controls, alerts and audit events to Google Drive for Work and Google for Education over the next several weeks.

For Google Drive for Work customers:

Set sharing settings by department
Sometimes different file settings make sense. You might, for example, have a research department that needs to keep information confidential and a sales team that needs to share presentations with their clients. To help manage these different sharing needs, now when you make selections in Drive settings from the Admin console, you can turn off sharing outside the domain for one organizational unit, while still allowing others to work and share files with anyone they need to.

Create custom Drive alerts and track more events with Drive audit

To keep track of when specific actions are taken in Drive, you can set up custom Drive alerts. So if you want to know when a file containing the word “confidential” in the title is shared outside the company, now you’ll know. And there are more events coming to Drive audit, including download, print and preview.

For all Google Apps for Work customers:

Set up custom admin alerts to find out when things change

There are lots of moving parts to running a company, and now it’s easier for IT to find out about the things they care about with custom alerts — like when a new app is installed or a shared calendar is deleted — and get those right in their inbox.

Let people reset their own passwords
Recovering passwords isn’t the most pleasant thing we do in our lives. But now IT can let employees securely reset their own passwords, so they don’t lose valuable time being locked out of their account. If this doesn’t make sense for your organization, admins can simply turn this ability off.

Available for all to use:

Disable downloading, printing and copying of any file with IRM
With Information Rights Management (“IRM”) you can disable downloading, printing and copying from the advanced sharing menu – perfect for when the file you’re sharing is only meant for a few select people. This new option is available for any file stored in Google Drive, including documents, spreadsheets and presentations created in Google Docs.

Share quickly with anyone outside your organization
When it comes to sharing, like giving final inventory lists to your caterer or last minute logos to your design agency, you want to make sure people can see it right away — whether they use Drive or not. Now, you can share with any email address and they’ll be able to view the files you share —without having to sign-in to a Google account. Admins can disable this feature for certain departments that want to require sign-in before , while enabling it for others.

All the above are rolling out over the next month.

Stay tuned for more
We’re also working on the ability to establish trusted domains, so businesses and schools that have multiple Google Apps domains or want to work with trusted partners or customers, can select multiple Google Apps domains that are OK to share with from Drive and Classroom. And on expiring access, because occasionally you only want to share files for a temporary amount of time. With expiring access you can set a future date when access will be removed. Stay tuned, theres more to come from Drive and Drive for Work.

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Doctor on Demand Improves Patient Care using Google Maps APIs

Posted by Ed Bindl, Senior Software Engineer and Jacinda Shelly, Lead Platform Engineer, Doctor on Demand

Editors note: Since the launch of Google Maps ten years ago, maps have come a long way. To celebrate a decade of map innovation, we’re highlighting unique maps built by our developer community. Read how guest bloggers, Ed Bindl and Jacinda Shelly, Software Engineers for Doctor on Demand, use the Google Maps APIs to bring unique mapping experiences to users.

Maps can do much more for an online business than help people get from point A to point B. You might not think that a website for making video appointments with medical professionals would benefit from mapping — but at Doctor on Demand, maps connect our patients to physicians faster and allow physicians to prescribe medications at the right pharmacies. Google Maps make our user experience much more satisfying, which means patients will use our service again.

We use the Google Maps APIs, including the Geolocation and Javascript APIs, to show patients a map of nearby pharmacies before they start a video call with a medical professional. For our users, maps make it easy and convenient to connect with physicians and pick up prescriptions at the pharmacy. But maps can be helpful for other businesses in other ways. And now that we see the great value of incorporating reliable map functionality into our app, wed love to share how you can do the same:

• Choose a familiar interface. Use a map that’s easy for people to navigate – if it’s hard to understand and requires extensive instructions, they won’t use it. We picked Google Maps because our patients know them well.

• Configure maps for many platforms. If your users find maps helpful on your desktop website, they’ll want to use maps from any browser or device. We’ve made sure our maps work just as well on iOS and Android devices as they do on a desktop computer.

• Maintain accuracy. In our case, we have to update the geolocation information for about 65,000 pharmacies across the country every evening. We use the Google Maps Geocoding API, which minimizes the time it takes to keep our map accurate. We keep a database of all pharmacies from Surescripts, a healthcare network, and each night we get an update to that database that adds, removes, and updates pharmacies and their locations. We use the Google Maps Javascript API to place the pharmacies on our map when a patient is asked to select a pharmacy.

• Meet compliance standards. In order to comply with medical regulations, Doctor On Demand must connect patients with physicians licensed in their state. We use the Google Maps Reverse Geocoding API to accurately determine the state a patient is located in before connecting them with a physician.

• Help users save time and make better choices. Before we built our pharmacy map, patients had to tell doctors which pharmacy they wanted to use. Then doctors emailed us the details. However, our support team had to follow up with doctors and patients to make sure we had the right pharmacy, since patients might say something like, “the drugstore down the street from my house.” Today, there’s no doubt about which pharmacy is the right one, since patients can clearly see their local outlets on the map.

Our pharmacy map inspires us to think about new ways to use maps in the future – like plotting the movement of cold and flu outbreaks and sharing this data with patients and doctors. We see a direct connection between maps and improving patient care. In the greater scheme, Google Maps improve the health of our patients, and, the health of our business.

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Madison Fifth builds interactive mall experiences for kiosks and mobile using Google Maps APIs

Posted by Chris Shirer, President and Chief Strategist of Madison + Fifth

Editors note: Today we hear from Chris Shirer, President and Chief Strategist of the digital brand management agency Madison + Fifth. Read how Madison + Fifth and Google Maps for Work Partner Woolpert used Google Maps APIs to build an interactive kiosk and mobile apps for the 60-acre Liberty Center mixed-use shopping center.

When the Liberty Center retail center outside of Cincinnati approached us to provide accessible, intuitive wayfinding for visitors, we saw the opportunity to create something unique — not just a standard kiosk and printed directory. The center includes shopping, restaurants, a hotel, offices and luxury housing, so we wanted to make sure visitors could get around quickly, especially during busy times like this past holiday shopping season. We decided to build a solution that would work on touchscreen kiosks and mobile devices to detect visitors’ locations and give them interactive walking directions in real time.

We chose Google Maps and Google Maps APIs to do it because Google offers a familiar interface for our customers, lets us layer custom information on top of maps and provides a platform that will allow us to add new features, like delivering relevant, location-based ads. We worked closely with Google Maps for Work Partner Woolpert to build the solution. Woolpert not only helped us with licensing information, but also did the programming based on our design and requirements.

Because we wanted the directory to work with both touchscreen kiosks and iOS and Android devices, we built a Web app using the Google Maps JavaScript API. The app scales automatically up to the large size of the kiosk and down to smartphones’ small screen sizes. With a Web app, we don’t have to build and maintain apps on multiple devices, and visitors with smartphones don’t have to download anything to use the service.

We started building the app before the Liberty Center was finished and opened to the public, which meant that Google didn’t yet have mapping information for the center’s streets and stores. We solved this by building a layer with the required information on top of the map. In addition, we had no routing information, so we built an algorithm to provide directions using open source Google Optimization Tools.

Liberty Center opened its doors on October 22, 2015, and thanks to Google Maps, we’re now delivering an engaging, interactive experience for visitors. People who walk up to the kiosks or use the Web app on their smartphones get customized walking directions based on their current location, and can zoom in and out around the property to explore shops and other destinations. Liberty Center shoppers can spend less time getting from place to place and more time in stores and enjoying time together in restaurants.

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Hilton helps guests book the perfect room with Google Maps APIs

Posted by Virginia Suliman, Vice President of Digital Design and Development, Hilton Worldwide

(Cross-posted on the Google Geo Developers Blog.)

Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is Virginia Suliman, Vice President of Digital Design and Development, Hilton Worldwide. Read how Hilton is experimenting with Google APIs to take the guess work out of the hotel booking and room selection process. Hilton is just one of many customers sharing their story as part of our cross-country road trip, Code the Road.

No one likes surprises when they reserve hotel rooms, so it’s crucial for Hilton that people see exactly what they’ll be getting before they arrive. Currently, Hilton’s HHonors guests can use the HHonors website and app as a one-stop tool to control their on-property experience – from finding the best hotels in the right neighborhoods and booking the most suitable one, to soon, using the app as a room key.

With a spirit of constant innovation, we’re always looking for new ways to enhance the guest experience. One way we’re doing so is by experimenting with the Google Maps APIs through proof of concept iPhone app functionality we built to enhance the room selection process during digital check-in. The concept tests a the Street View panoramas, part of the Google Maps SDK for iOS, letting users see on the app the exact view they’ll experience when they get to their hotel room. For example, they could virtually look out their window on the app and select the room that overlooks a park or a quiet street corner.

People care not just about the hotel they stay in, but also about the neighborhood, including what kinds of food, entertainment and amenities are nearby. So in our concept, we also tested a controlled list of businesses and points of interest from the Google Maps Places API for IOS to highlight nearby destinations via the HHonors app, like Lincoln Center in New York City, a great fish restaurant in Boston, or the Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta.

The full potential of Google APIs sets in when you combine them. If successful, the Maps and Street View panorama concepts could one day fully integrate into our HHonors app or global web portal, which already uses Google Maps Business View to offer panoramic virtual tours of our properties to guests.

We believe that happy travelers are repeat customers who become loyalists. If you feel connected to the experience you’ve had with us, you’re more likely to return and to tell others about it. Through technology, we’re hoping to make it easier for people to find the perfect room, have an unforgettable stay and come back for another adventure.

We were delighted to participate in the Code the Road trip. We hosted the Code the Road bus at our Hilton Chicago property on June 10 and at Hilton Headquarters in McLean, Virginia on June 22. You can also see the Hilton HHonors app window-view proof of concept demo on the bus.

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The Google Fit Developer Challenge winners

Posted by Angana Ghosh, Product Manager, Google Fit

Last year, we teamed up with adidas, Polar, and Withings to invite developers to create amazing fitness apps that integrated the new Google Fit platform. The community of Google Fit developers has flourished since then and to help get them inspired, we even suggested a few ideas for new, fun, innovative fitness apps. Today, we’re announcing the twelve grand prize winners, whose apps will be promoted on Google Play.

• 7MinGym: All you need is this app, a chair, and a wall to start benefiting from 7 minute workouts at home. You can play music from your favorite music app and cast your workout to Chromecast or Android TV.
• Aqualert: This app reminds you to stay hydrated throughout the day and lets you track your water intake.
• Cinch Weight Loss and Fitness: Cinch helps you with detailed information your steps taken and calories burned. The app also supports heart-rate tracking with compatible Android Wear devices.
• FitHub: FitHub lets you track your fitness activity from multiple accounts, including Google Fit, and multiple wearable devices, including Android Wear. You can also add your friends to compare your progress!
• FitSquad: FitSquad turns fitness into a competition. Join your friends in a squad to compare progress, track achievements, and cheer each other on.
• Instant - Quantified Self: Instant is a lifestyle app that helps you track not only your physical activity but your digital activity too and tells you how much you’re using your phone and apps.other activity. You can also set usage limits and reminders.
• Jump Rope Wear Counter: This simple app lets you count your jump rope skips with an Android Wear device.
• Move it!: This app packs one neat feature – it reminds you to get up and move about if you haven’t been active in the last hour.
• Openrider - GPS Cycling Riding: Track and map your cycle routes with Openrider.
• Running Buddies: In this run tracking app, runners can choose to share their runs and stats with those around them so that they can find other runners similar to themselves to go running with.
• Strength: Strength is a workout tracking app that also lets you choose from a number of routines, so you can get to your workout quickly and track it without manual data entry. Schedules and rest timers come included.
• Walkholic: Walkholic is another way to see your Google Fit walking, cycling, and running data. You can also turn on notifications if you don’t meet your own preset goals.

We saw a wide range of apps that integrated Google Fit, and both the grand prize winners and the runner ups will be receiving some great devices from our challenge partners to help with their ongoing fitness app development: the X_CELL and SPEED_CELL from adidas, a new Android Wear device, a Loop activity tracker with a H7 heart rate sensor from Polar, and a Smart Body Analyzer from Withings.

We’re thrilled these developers chose to integrate the Google Fit platform into their apps, giving users one place to keep all their fitness activities. With the user’s permission, any developer can store or read the user’s data from Google Fit and use it to build powerful and useful fitness experiences. Find out more about integrating Google Fit into your app.

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