Welcome to Google Earth and the Google Earth Community!



You will find that hours enjoyed with Google Earth and the Community posts offer greater understanding of the world and its people than that developed in a lifetime of education, conversation, reading, and television. This is a common experience for Google Earth users. Also common is the realization after a few months' enjoyment that many features and subtle powers of Google Earth and the Google Earth Community were at first overlooked.

To help you get started more easily, this thread contains tips and suggestions based on the comments of thousands of users, Google Earth's developers, and personal experience. Google Earth is a deep application. It rewards those who learn more about using it with greater insight, better understanding, and more fun. This leads to greater wisdom, enhanced awareness of our personal position in the continuity of human life, and if you work at it, guidance in reconsidering personal perceptions of the Earth's people, nations, and situation. Google Earth is the power tool for this voyage of discovery.

Look for numbered posts as follow-ups to this one. The place to start is with a good book.

P.S. If you just landed at this web page by accident and are wondering what Google Earth is, here is the short answer: Google Earth is a computer system that interactively streams more than 10,000 gigabytes of Earth information (images, elevation, business data, ...) to personal computers over the Internet. As a Google Earth user you can explore the earth and zoom down to cities and points of interest, seeing buildings, roads, cars, and even people. Visit earth.google.com for details. The Google Earth Community--where you are now--is the user forum for Google Earth users.

In every family gathering there is always the one person people go to for help assembling toys, hooking up electronic equipment, or setting the clock on the VCR. What is the secret of these people who seem smarter than everyone else? They read instructions!

You too can have this aura of omnipotence by investing a few minutes now to read the Google Earth documentation. Though it may be Keyhole's best-kept secret, the new-user and reference information available to you is about as good as one could hope for: easy to read, thorough, illustrated, well-indexed, and concise.

Launch Google Earth,
select "Help" on the menu bar,
and select "Contents..."

This will launch the documentation directly or else download it from a Google Earth server and then launch it for your reading pleasure. Where to start? At the beginning. Open the "Getting Started" topic and you will find answers to just about everything, a comprehensive index, and even the ability to search for specific topics.

You will learn Google Earth features in a few minutes that you will use for a lifetime.

Read the documentation now, then learn about the latest news.

Extra! Extra! READ ALL ABOUT IT!



Sometimes important events happen after the Google Earth documentation has been completed. When this happens, the late-breaking news is described in the Google Earth Release Notes. (The release notes are edited up to the minute the software is built.) The release notes have the latest details about:

Installing Google Earth
Minimal hardware and software configurations
Recommended configurations
Compatibility issues with graphics and operating system versions
New features
Known problems from prior releases that have been fixed
Warnings about problems known in this version, and,
The latest details about graphics card and graphics driver issues

Have you ever wondered, "Maybe there is something wrong here?", "Am I the only one with this problem?", or, "Somebody must have seen this before!" Check the release notes to see if the problem is understood--most known issues have solutions explained in the release notes. This is especially true if you ever have mysterious graphics problems. In such cases your first* thought should be, "I'll go look at the release notes right now!" You don't even need to start the Keyhole client. (Which is wise since the release notes may tell you how to get the client working in the first place.)

Click on the Windows START BUTTON
Navigate to the PROGRAMS menu
Navigate to the Google Earth menu
Select "Release Notes"


In fact, have you read your release notes lately? Why not read them now. When you finish, the ext stop on the getting acquainted tour is joining the Google Earth Community.

* Your second thought should be, "I probably need to update my graphics driver. I will go to the appropriate web page right now, either that of my notebook or pre-built system manufacturer or else that of my graphics card vendor." Here are a few common ones:

• ATI
  
• Intel
  
• NVIDIA
  
• SiS
  

P.S. A good third thought is "I wonder if Windows Update has anything for me?"

One thing is certain--you have already found the Google Earth Community BBS or you would not be reading this tip. But have you joined as a member?


Be anonymous if you want, but why not join in the fun?

Membership has low risk to you: admission is free, does not subject you to unwanted emailings (just an initial verification email and a welcome Private Message), and does not expose your email address to others.

Membership is rewarding to you and others: your comments are attributed to you, your posting status increases with each interesting contribution and alerts others that you are someone to be heard, and you become a resource for other Google Earth Community members. You are a resource because others can click on your (made up if you prefer) Google Earth Community user name and send you a private message. This is common. You post or comment about a place and then people may send you a note asking about great restaurants or boat rental advice.

MEMBERSHIP F.A.Q.

Is there a charge? NO
Are credit checks required? NO
Must I have prior experience? NO
Is there a medical examination? NO
Will Keyhole send spam emails? NO
Will a salesman call? NO
How do I join? Just click on "New user" above and enter your real email address.

A confirmation email will be sent to the email address that you enter. Just click on the link provided in that email and your account creation process will be complete. When you log in, notice that you have a Private Message from the BBS Administrator. (Flashing icon at upper left) Click on that to see what Penguin Opus has to say, reply if you like (he will read it), and you are then installed as a full member.

Oh, there is one more benefit. Once you sign up and sign in, several additional features of the Google Earth Community BBS will be made instantly available to you through an expanded MENU BAR at the top of the Google Earth Community page. See who else is online right now. Revel in your new-found powers!

Once you join, the next step is to join in--review older posts to see what is there, learn the tone of the community by following conversations, and take note what you don't see ("Buy shoes from me!", "I hate candidate X", "Member Y is a jerk", "People from that country are anteaters", "For a good time, call this number", or, "Use my competitive product instead."*). This last is important; it is the 'fit' part of 'fitting in'.


Be brave. Come out from hiding and join us.

Welcome to the vibrant Google Earth Community. Once you've joined and toured the various forums, please return here and learn more about adjusting the Google Earth Community to suit your style.

* A few posts have crossed over this line, but so far they seem to be related more to inexperience than aggression. Let's hope for the best and presume they just need extra time to develop their social skills.

The Google Earth Community BBS is a powerful portal into the Google Earth world. Take a few moments to personalize it to your tastes so that it will serve you optimally. The control panel for this is behind the menu label "My Home" (in the BBS, not in the Google Earth client.) Click there and you will find that you can:

A. Edit personal information:

• Change your email address
  
• Set your password
  
• Enter your full name
  
• Define a signature to be attached at the bottom of every post
  
• Add a link to your website if you have one
  
• Describe yourself and your location
  
• Present a short biography
  
• Provide additional contact information
  
• Set an image to be shown next to your name in posts, and,
  
• Control what other people see about you and you see about them
  

It is all up to you. Tailor it to suit you perfectly!

B. Edit display preferences:

• Select your language
  
• Pick a new look for the entire BBS (bright, colorful, subdued, dark, etc.)
  
• Define your offset from Universal Google Earth BBS time
  
• Set your destination and configuration when first logging in
  
• Set the number of shown threads
  
• Specify a default sort order, and most importantly,
  
• Set the size and configuration of listings and edit boxes.
  

This last is important. In fact, it motivated this whole tip! Be sure to configure to see ALL threads no matter how old, and my advice is to set your text area columns and rows much bigger (80x40) so that when you start to post, you'll not be forced to write through a tiny aperture. (Mine is configured to be even bigger, but that is because I am wordy when writing. )

C. Manage receiving forum posts by email and change message notifications. This area allows you to change notification so that you will get email when certain events happen at the BBS. This can be handy, for example, so that you can know when people reply on a favorite thread or send you a private message. You can also opt-in for rare (ever?) mailings to Google Earth Community members who have asked to be included in the mailing.

These are all interesting, but among them the most important to me was providing a link to a web site of my choice, uploading an icon, choosing the display "skin", setting the way-back machine to show all posts from the beginning of the Google Earth Community, enlarging the number of threads that are shown by default, and setting a huge edit box size for use in writing posts.

P.S. Did I mention that you should configure your login to show all the posts and not just the most recent few? Once you've done that, it will be time to tune-up your Google Earth Client for maximum performance!

Google Earth is a sophisticated application that tests many aspects of computer capability. This is an indirect way of saying that more of the transistors in your computer are earning their pay when you run Google Earth than at nearly any other time. (DOOM3 gives them a good workout too, but without Google Earth's sophisticated dynamic texture loading.) Getting maximum performance begins with reviewing your computer's existing health problems.

BEFORE THE TUNE-UP


From the tiny acorn grows the mighty oak

TUNE YOUR COMPUTER

1. The most effective way to make Google Earth perform faster on your computer is to make your computer faster. This may not be that difficult since replacing an older graphics board for a new, fast one makes a world of difference. For less than $200, both ATI and NVIDIA can put the wind in your hair as you fly the world in Google Earth.

2. Also important is physical disk health and speed. If your disk is sick, replace it ASAP. If your disk is more than 80% full, replace it with a disk of greater capacity. If you do not have a frequent regimen of disk defragmenting with a defragmenter that also restores file order on disk then a very low-cost upgrade is available to you. I use O&O Software's OODefrag and perform a weekly Full/Name defragmentation. The effect is significant. There are many vendors of similar software so check around. But do not be mislead by advertising about how quickly a product defragments or how completely it can defragment an almost filled disk. The first is silly ("I can perform that surgery faster than anyone!") and the second is moot (Windows will make things slow when your disk is 90%+ full no matter how well the disk may be organized.) Only buy products that can force a total order onto the disk in an effort to minimize seeks.

3. A generous amount of system memory (RAM) is a boon to all applications and Google Earth is no exception. The range from 512MB to 2048MB may sound like an oversupply, but is a low-cost way to optimize system performance by allowing Windows to keep all programs resident to avoid swapping, allowing programs extra room to maneuver (Google Earth, Photoshop, etc.), and giving the operating system space to keep recently accessed disk pages in memory for instant recall as is useful in Google Earth tour mode.

TUNE GOOGLE EARTH PERFORMANCE

Now we get to the part that is easiest to control, the Google Earth Client application. Start Google Earth, select "Edit" and then "Preferences", then review the various controls in the preference dialog. The three for you to think about are these:

1. Click the "Cache" tab, and then set the disk cache to a big size, I suggest 512MB. Set the memory cache to a big size too, but no larger than is reasonable for your machine's available RAM. Start with half of your system RAM size and let the application make it smaller for you if it notices that there is less free memory than you expected. The disk cache holds data from prior uses of Google Earth and the memory cache holds the data you were seeing moments ago. Having these big (and having enough RAM in your computer to do so) are the key to tuning Google Earth performance on a particular system.

2. Click the "View" tab, and then note the Detail Area setting. A smaller detail area makes for quicker viewing since less data is downloaded to your computer, but it also makes for a blurry fringe at the edges of your screen. Try this several ways and use the smallest size you find acceptable to get the highest performance.

3. Also in the "View" tab is the "Texture Colors" control. If you have an old, slow, tired notebook computer, motherboard with integrated graphics, or ancient graphics card (that really wants to be replaced ) then experiment with changing this to the 16-bit mode. It will make your display worse, but may make it faster as well. If you have a modern AGP-style system with graphics of the last few years the 32-bit setting is for you. Changing this won't make fast systems faster; it only makes slow systems less slow.

Note that it is good to make just one change at a time, apply that change, click OK to leave the control panel, and use the Google Earth client for a while to judge performance.

AFTER THE TUNE UP


Anything can be accelerated by making the proper adjustments.

Now that the vehicle is race-prepared, it is time for a few driving lessons. Let's get started!

When Sir Isaac Newton wrote, "If I have seen farther than others it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants" he was being generous, but he was also being truthful. Advancement is most often an incremental process with one advance inspiring and providing a foundation for the next. So it is with the Google Earth Community. While millions of places remain undiscoverd, a few thousand places on our world have alreaady been located, highlighted with a placemark, and described here on the BBS. Which places, you may ask? Well, there is a secret to that and I would like to share it with you.

If you are new to Google Earth you may not yet know that built-in are many interesting data layers that can be displayed on the Google Earth globe. You will already be familiar with Roads, 3D Terrain, and Borders, three of the layers that have their own button in the Google Earth navigation panel. These are just a few of the layers. The others are available in the "Layers" panel on the left side of the Google Earth screen . Why not start Google Earth and have a look now.

The first few entries are user created community layers; then begins a long list of georeferenced data: populated places, geographic features, railroads, waterways, earthquake data, volcanoes, airports, and many more. In fact, the list is so long that you need to scroll down to see all of it. Here is what the top of the list looks like:


Layers tab, at the top, with GOOGLE EARTH COMMUNITY BBS layers enabled

Did you notice that there is an extra data layer enabled in the example above? This is the Google Earth Community BBS layer, and to enable it, just click the checkbox next to Google Earth Community. What does this do? It causes special symbols to be shown in Google Earth everywhere there has been a Google Earth Community post with an attachment!


Las Vegas with several potentially interesting buildings in view


Same view, but this time with the Google Earth Community layer enabled

Each of the information icons in the bottom image is a placemark taken from a Google Earth Community posting. Right clicking on one of these icons--for example, the Tokyo Waterpark BBS icon--offers several options, most notably a snippet from the post itself and a hyperlink to the BBS post. Clicking on the link causes the associated Google Earth Community page to be opened. Neat!

Keeping the Google Earth Community BBS layer enabled is helpful. It lets you know how to learn more about the earth than would be possible just by looking at the Google Earth image and it lets you know what places have already been described in prior posts. Before you make a post, be sure to enable this layer to see if the location you plan to describe has already been placemarked.

You might still want to make a placemark or a post--to describe new events there, tell of your own experiences, or to correct a prior post's commentary--but this way you know which post to reply to so that the discussion is organized and future visitors will not overlook your comments.

Now that you know how to enable the Google Earth Community data layer and thereby stand on the shoulders of giants, you have earned your wings and are ready to fly the world and make new posts about new discoveries and make new replies about existing discoveries.

If you fly to Las Vegas, enable the Google Earth Community layer, and then right click on the Tokyo Waterpark, you may be surprised by what you see. To learn why, see the next tip on posting to the Community.

P.S. The data layers you scrolled past are interesting too, but you already knew that if you read the documentation! Here is a little-known tip. Examine the Digital Globe ("DG") layers. Enable the low cloud-cover layer in each year, and you will see the locations where high-resolution Google Earth data is likely to be available soon.

Ready to take the plunge and comment on the posts of others or create new posts of your own? It is easy to do but there are a few tips to make the most of the opportunity.



1. Log in before posting. (You did already join the Google Earth Community, right?) You can verify that you are signed in by looking at the BBS menu bar. If there is an entry to "Logout" than you are already logged in; if there is an entry to "Login" then guess what--now is the time.

2. Decide where to post. This is easier when replying so that is the situation we will discuss first. You have logged in, found a post that you want to comment on, and are ready to make your reply. All you need to do is select the post you want to reply to and then click "Reply." Makes sense to me.

3. You will now see a "Reply to" page that asks for the new subject for your reply and provides an area to add the body of your post. If you have not read these tips in order then you may see a tiny Post window, but if you followed the suggestions and read the posts in order (and took their advice) then you now see a nice big edit box for your august commentary.

4. When you are done composing, click at the bottom that you want to continue. You will be shown a preview of the new post. This is your chance to read the post carefully for typos or mistakes. If you have errors just scroll down to the bottom edit area and make yuor changes. Once this cycle has produced your intended result, click the preview-area Continue button to submit your post.

The second "preview and compose more" page is in two parts, an upper preview area and a lower edit area. (Each area is surrounded by a box.) Either click "continue" in the upper preview box to 'submit your completed page' for posting or scroll down to the edit box, make your changes, and then click the "continue" in that box to 'preview these edits'. The button text imay be confusing at first, but will become clear with practice. Failing to click the top-most continue button means that you will never actually post anything; only clicking the bottom-most continue button will trap you in an endless preview cycle.

In just a few moments, your thoughts will be shared with the world. Thousands of readers will see more than your ideas; they will know that you graduated from grammar school by your writing style and will sense the depth of your thinking by the new subject that you chose for your post. (Moral: make sure the subject line is appropriate and use the preview to review your posts!)

What happens if the subject line is left unchanged? Here is an example:


What you saw if you did the exercise suggested in the prior post

Notice that the first post, the one by gmdealer, was about a water park in Tokyo, Japan. When osc3 replied to this post to share another water park--this one in Las Vegas--the subject was unchanged. Not a problem, but not very helpful to people deciding what posts to read. Someone planning to visit Las Vegas may never learn about the water park near the Sahara Hotel that has been so helpfully shared. Further, the automatic script that publishes every post with a placemark as a new entry in the Google Earth Community data layer will use this 'Tokyo Waterpark' subject as the label for the icon in the Google Earth database. Now you know why there is a "Tokyo Waterpark" in Las Vegas.

Please think about this when you post so that your information is readable and properly indexed. A little attention now means that you will someday be able to look back and see all of your nicely written posts and the corresponding aptly-named icons in the Google Earth Community data layer.

You have now graduated the first course. Congratulations!

With what you have learned, you should be able to enjoy Google Earth and the Google Earth Community both easily and competently, and we welcome you as a learned new member.

In the Google Earth, just as in the real one, there are always further layers to the onion. If you want to master the creating and sharing of Placemarks(TM), there is no better way to learn than to continue your education with community member Lrae's excellent Placemarks and Overlays (Basic Training) tutorial. (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED) When you extend your education with his entertaining information, you will be able to post not only places on the world, but pictures (photos, maps, aerials, charts) that are an even more rewarding annotation to the Google Earth.

P.S. Notice that osc3's reply is indented below gmdealer's post? This is the way of posts and replies. When a thread gets long with many posts it is especially helpful to others that you choose carefully which post you are replying to, but that is a subject for another tip!