Warning: somewhat cryptic techobabble follows.

Many of you have noticed that Google Earth exposes a COM Type Library (win32 only, of course). We've been tweaking it through the various public beta releases and we think it's now ready for a little more attention.

There are several important points to keep in mind:

1. This is BETA quality. Which means it's NOT RELEASE QUALITY, is subject to change, etc.

2. We're calling it an API. A better name might be "interface that gives you several useful methods for programmatically controlling some aspects of the application behaviour", but API sounds catchier.

3. This is BETA quality. YMMV.

4. Support for this is somewhat informal. There is no email address, there are no telephone numbers, etc. There is, however, this fine forum and this fine body of fellow GE enthusiasts. (The people responsible for developing this stuff are avid readers...)

5. The documentation is here: http://earth.google.com/comapi/

6. Have I mentioned that this is BETA quality?

Praise, criticisms, flames, bug reports etc. all welcomed as replies in this thread.

Great News!

To start the ball rolling the

earth.idl - original IDL for COM interface and documentation.

link is broken [this is on the main page linked to above]

And it turns out that the documentation is also BETA...

http://earth.google.com/comapi/earth_8idl.html

(The "files" tab gives the correct link. Nice catch, thanks.)

Hurray! I've been looking for this official documentation for weeks. Thanks to the helpful folks here for getting me through the API pre-documentation.

nice to see the COM API getting some official (albeit beta) backing.

Are there any plans for an ActiveX like control that allows for embedding of the main globe view? I think I saw a Google Maps interview some time ago where embedding GE into a web browser was discussed. This can be accomplished now with the help of some hwnd reparenting and subclassing but it would be nice if this were a supported feature.


cheers
brian

I'm working with the COM API with Java through a Java-COM bridge. the GetMainHwnd function returns an int with the current bridge I'm using. Is there anyway to manipualte this in Java? Possibly to embed it in a JFrame? I fear this might begin to take this thread off topic but you mentioned it I'd figure I'd ask.

I don't know about Java or how to reparent to a JFrame but you can traverse the windows hwnd hierarchy using standard WIN32 functions(FindWindowEx, SendMessage, SetParent etc). When you find the hwnd housing the main display, reparent it to your hwnd and move the main GE hwnd offscreen (or invisible), toggle its window style to remove it from taskbar. get a copy of Spy++ to see the current GE windows layout.

this is a really ghetto way to build a task specific applicaiton around GE so it would be great if a fully supported ActiveX (or similar) control was supported.

cheers
brian

Everything looks great. Been messing around with it and haven't found any problems.

One question and one comment:
I was poking around at the Apple Script Dictionary for the Mac version of GE (also in beta). And there is a function called MoveCamera(x,y) that starts the camera moving at the velocity vector passed.
Are there plans to have a similar function for the win32 COM API, or will this eventually be dropped form the Apple Script library?

Also:
A nice addition to the OpenKmlFile function would be the ability to open the KML and not have GE fly-to the placemark. Or is that option configured in the KML file itself?

This was a quiet pre-release of the COM API documentation, but... it's been a bit too quiet. For those who've been using it, we've tried to address the deficiencies with the new version and are looking for as much feedback as possible before it goes gold.

Thanks for all the comments so far and tell your dev friends to give it a try.

I think I've mentioned this in other places, but I figured I'd remention it here since the API is officially in beta now.

When i call the LoadKmlData and pass it a string containing a <Update> tag it throws an error. But if I take that same KML string, write it to a file and then use OpenKmlFile it works. I was wondering if anyone else was experiencing similar problems.