Scott Mebberson

The ability to use custom Google Maps icons (the graphics that mark locations on a Google Map) has been around for a long time, but a feature that is rarely used.

You can use a custom icon to great affect, making your map ‘look and feel’ more like your brand. I’ve thrown together a quick example showing a custom icon on a Google Map.

After you’ve created your custom icon, it is relatively simply to define the custom icon:

// create the custom icon
var customIcon = new GIcon(G_DEFAULT_ICON);
customIcon.image = "wsimages/marker.png";
customIcon.iconSize = new GSize(109, 28);
customIcon.iconAnchor = new GPoint(30, 27);

and then use the custom icon:

var marker = new GMarker(point, {icon:customIcon});
map.addOverlay(marker);

Go and check it out, or download the example directly.

We currently have an interesting problem with Google Earth. There is a nice big cloud directly over a location we want to zoom in on.

The strip of cloud appears directly on top of the location we’re interested in, and it is proving rather annoying!

Google hasn’t updated this part of the world (or specifically this strip) for quite some time, so I thought I’d dig around to see what I could find out about the frequency of updates to the satellite imagery.

I found some interesting information, but in short, I didn’t find any real public information about how and when Google update the imagery, or what the selection criteria is (blurry vs obstructed, etc). It all seems rather random.

• Google Earth FAQ : Age of satellite imagery and data
• Google Earth Community page, apparently where Google provide information about updates to their Primary Database
• A Google Lat Long Blog post about updates to Google Earth and Maps

I should probably use the database report page, maybe Google might pay attention to this one silly strip of cloud? I can’t even imagine how many reports they receive to fix insignificant strips of the earth.