(cross-posted from the Official Google Mobile Blog)
The world just got a little bit smaller. Google Earth is now available for the iPhone and iPod touch, allowing you to fly to the far reaches of the world from the palm of your hand. Since we launched Google Earth for the desktop in 2005, we’ve had over 400 million unique downloads, and people from around the world have used it to view their house, research travel destinations, learn how to make the world a better place, find local businesses, and view geo-located photos. Now, with a free download from the iTunes App Store, you can fly through the same 3D immersive world of Google Earth you’ve come to love, without having to fire up your desktop computer.
Check out this video tour to see Google Earth for iPhone in action:
Not only is having Google Earth on your iPhone convenient, but the touch interface is a very natural way to interact with the Earth. Just swipe your finger across the screen and you fly to the other side of the globe; tilt your phone and your view tilts as well. You can pinch to zoom in or out, or just double tap with one finger to zoom in and two fingers to zoom out. We also integrated the My Location feature, so with a touch of a button, you can fly to where you are in the real world on your phone. In addition, we have over eight million Panoramio photos, which are geo-located photos of places, and you can view any and all of them from your iPhone. Besides being beautiful, high-quality pictures, they’re specifically of places, so you don’t have to see some guy’s family on vacation in Thailand–you can see the beaches, the temples, all the things that give you a real sense of the place. Here is a nice shot of the Grand Palace that I found on my virtual tour of Bangkok:
This is a tale of a crashed iPod Touch and it’s subsequent painless restore:
A few days ago my iPod Touch (16GB) crashed and went into restore / recovery mode, or perhaps I put it into restore / recovery mode accidentally. At boot-up it showed the restore / recovery screen: a USB cable being plugged into iTunes (see image on the right).
In case you don’t know:
to quit a hung application you press and hold the home button, for 5 to 10 seconds
to force a complete device restart you press and hold the lock/unlock button along with the home button for about 5 to 10 seconds
I’d been having a few problems with it, prior to the crash: it wouldn’t stay connected to my home wi-fi network and had started behaving strangely. I forced a device restart (maybe 2 or 3 times) and it then showed the ‘restore-me’ icon (as described above).
Maybe it ‘decided’ it needed a restore (as system problems were apparent) or maybe I didn’t let go of the home button – I was distracted reading a web page at the time about the upcoming Apple event ( New MacBooks look amazing BTW).
I re-connected it to iTunes which detected an iPod Touch in restore/recovery mode and offered to re-flash/reload the firmware and operating system and I accepted – the firmware and OS were loaded, verified and the iPod Touch rebooted (took about up 30 mins up until the reboot I think).
Albuquerque NM – Big Stone Phone today has shipped a brand new application for the iPhone and iPod Touch named “Pulsar”. Pulsar V 1.0 is a free pulsing light show application with many options and settings to control the light generated. Use it to set the mood with the slow pulse mode or increase the speed to ultra fast to induce a hypnotic state!
3 Comments | 
IPhone, apple, ipod touch, itunes, software | 
Permalink
Posted by Richard
