Just in case someone in Sydney hasn’t seen this yet, Google will be having a plane fly low over Sydney on Australia Day (Jan 26 for those at home) taking super-high resolution photos of people celebrating. There’s a map on that page showing the area that the plane will fly in and a nifty little click-and-drag marker that shows the approximate time that the plane will be flying overhead.  The x marks the spot shadow and bounce on drop is a particularly nice effect, does anyone know if that’s a standard Maps API function or something custom they’ve written?

Anyway, if you can make it into Sydney on Australia Day, do something for the camera, and once the images go live, leave a comment linking to where you were.

[via Simon, Mashup, Google Maps Mania & Google Operating System]

The Paint.NET developers have put up the first release candidate build for the 3.0 release. This is a great application for image editing.  It’s fast & reliable.  And while it may not have all the super-professional features of Photoshop (eg. Pantone colours), it’s plenty powerful enough for the average home user and I’ve found it to be more than enough for web & application development work. The previous 2.x releases were good, but they were lacking.  Most notably they lacked a multi-document interface, ie. having more than one file open at a time.  The 3.0 releases have added this, along with a swag of other features.

• More intuitive and more powerful toolbar
• User-definable color palette (as opposed to just the color wheel)
• Gradient drawing
• “Merge Down” layer command
• New effects: Clouds, Median, Unfocus, Outline, and an improved Sharpen

It also handles layers, with blending options and opacity. There’s a whole bunch of image effects with on-the-fly previewing. It also has my favourite feature: unlimited undos!  It’s also open source, released under the MIT licence.  The 3.0 releases also have built-in support for eight different languages: English, Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazil) & Spanish.

There’s an active forum community for answering questions and reporing bugs.  That forum also has a bunch of plugins to download.

The only downside (for some people at least) is that it needs the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 and at least Windows XP (SP2).  Prior to 3.0 it did run on Windows 2000, but support for that was dropped with the 3.0 betas.  Works on 2003 & Vista.

This  application has become an absolutely integral part of my freelance development work, and we even have it installed as part of our standard developer image at my day job. 

This post is part of the O’Reilly Windows Developer Tools Day, celebrating the tools that make Windows developers lives easier.

Google Maps now has an Australian domain: maps.google.com.au. It’s the same site as maps.google.com, except it starts with the satellite view of Australia & you don’t need to put Australia in the search query when looking up Australian addresses. For example, if I was searching for Penrith in New South Wales, in Google Maps Australia I just have to search for Penrith, where as the regular Google Maps doesn’t find it, unless I add NSW Australia.

One other thing I noticed, while Google Maps is a fully fledged graduate of the Labs, Google Maps Australia is still in beta:

I’m hoping that this means, with the release of this domain, that business directory listings like what they have for the US & the UK aren’t too far off.

I’ve written up an open search plugin (a.k.a. Firefox search engine), which you can grab from the Mycroft site.

[via Google Maps Mania]