New Updated Google Earth #5

Thanks I will download it tonight.

thanks for the heads up

for the heads up.

Thanks

w00t

This IS an improvement. Thanks for letting us know.

thanks

Google Earth 5 will import my Routes, but it draws straight lines from waypoint to waypoint. It does not follow the roads. What's up with that?

Thanks. Ill download and try it out.

Just tried it with my nuvi 250 and was disapointed. It does bring in the "Favorites", but while it says it downloaded 36 tracks (trip logs), it says there are zero points in them and doesn't display anything. Too bad, it would have been nice to use Google Earth to view trip logs rather than Mapsource, but apparently I can't.

Glad to at least find out this way though rather than buying the old plus version to get GPS capability only to find it doesn't work.

And so far I can only find options to import or to use it with real-time GPS input. Can't send anything to the GPS. I'll have to hook up my usb GPS and play around a bit with the real time option, but while I have used Google earth a fair amount in the past and really like it, it doesn't look like I'll get any use out of the Garmin GPS "feature".

Can't wait to try it...

I have mentioned before - but worth it again.

With a digital camera I take a photo of the lat/long on the GPS when I take photos at a place when on holiday. I can always go back to Google Earth to see exactly where I was - very neat if you have a shocking memory.....

Ya i've heard a lot of good things about the new version of Google Earth. gonna have to play around....

For me it works great by itself, but none of the GPS stuff works properly with my Nuvi 205

Thanks for the heads up.

thanks I will try it

Thanks I will download today, but have to learn how to configure with nuvi 680

Thanks for the heads up. I'll have to check that out tonight.

I am going to jump right on that.

However, I find the installer very sneaky. It would not show what it is doing, not sure the directory it is installing the files. After installation, it was nice to play around with, but I could not get beyond the feeling that it was a software "beyond my control." Even getting a standalone installer proved difficult. It was a 500KB file which downloads other stuff which I don't know. Good for people who have found it useful. I used system restore to get it off my machine. I glad my machine is google free.

That's not the worst of it. A few months ago, after having updated Google Earth 4.3, I found that the Google Update program was always running in the background and in fact had installed the Google Chrome browser without my knowledge or permission. I killed the Google Updater, but it keeps trying to come back, needed to use special software to track it down and keep it from running. And I now keep a rule in my firewall so that Google Updater, if it does get to run, can no longer get out to the Internet. If I want to update Google Earth or another Google Product that I want I temporarily clear the rule. But I sure don't want extra browsers and other software that I'll never use showing up on my system. In addition to wasting space, it's a security problem.

All you have to do is to use Control Panel, Uninstall and then Remove the Updater. You may have to run msconfig and remove the Google entry from the start up section. No special software is needed, nor is it necessary to do a system restore to remove it.

It's just a program, like any other legitimate program you've installed. If it installed Google Chrome, then you missed the checkbox that allowed it to install. Google installs nothing more or less than what you tell it to. It is not spyware, adware, or any other malicious, incidious program.

It's also no more of a security risk than any other program.

I watch pretty carefully what I allow Google to install. Have always told it to not install Gooogle desktop or the other stuff that they often try to piggy back in with an install. Can I say for certain that I didn't miss some choice that they had put in there? No, but I'm pretty sure that I didn't. And if they did manage to sneak something past me when I was very much trying not to get anything more than what I was trying to install, I still would feel that it wasn't being done in the most open and apparent way. To suggest that it's ok to install unwanted software just because a user didn't find every place to uncheck extra software that is about to be made by a drive-by install is too generous to drive-by software installs.

As to the security risk, I was referring to the browser itself, although now that you mention it, yes, the Google Updater always running secretly in the background is certainly a big security problem. I would say that it is a lot more of a security risk than other programs that are installed and not running. Also, on most systems it will be know to have already have access to get past the firewall, and it has all of the code in it to download and install anything. And it's Google, which means it is very widely distributed. Other than IE or Outlook you couldn't come up with a better attack vector. How can you say with a straight face that it is "no more of a security risk than any other program"?

Once something as violated my trust, I'm not going to trust it to uninstall itself and just believe that everything is all right, particularly if it was quietly and secretly running in the background. I have used several tools to monitor and control all of those pesky things that start up and run secretely at boot time. Currently I'm using StartupRun available at
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/strun.html . It lets me watch all the stuff that starts at boot time, and stop stuff that I don't want, no matter which of several techniques it is using to start itself. Many people, maybe even yourself, might be shocked to see how many things needlessly start themselves when Windows boots. Stopping the Updater from running automatically this way is a nice one-time fix, I don't have to go back and fix things every time that I do want a Google Earth update or some other software revision. If you are happy uninstalling the updater and trusting it, then good luck with that, but why uninstall it at all if you trust it? My intention was not to uninstall it, it was to keep it from running secretely in the background, wasting resources and secretely downloading things that I didn't want. My fix did what I want.

The Google Chrome browser was a optional install that I elected not to install.

Before they complete an install people need to look at what options if any that are selected or what boxes are checked and make the decision before they continue.

This is cool! It imported my tracks and shows the path along a trip we took from Chicago to Cincinnati in December, including the stops for gas, food, & reststop.

It didn't show the jackknifed truck that we sat behind for 2 hours waiting for it to be removed, though!! But, the icon at that point shows an average speed of 0.2 mph!

How very interesting. Was this with your Nuvi 850? If so do you have any insight on why it might behave differently than attempting to import from a Nuvi 250?

Since you seem to be having better results than I have had, let me ask another question. Did you bring in your Favorites (waypoints), and if so how are they displayed in Google Earth? It did bring in my "Favorites" and indeed a little flag shows up at each location where I had a favorite, but that's it. There seems to be no information associated with the flags. i would have expected the name of the favorite/waypoint to be associated with the flag, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I just have flags, and have to depend on my knowledge of what favorites I've created to know what the flags represent.

Yes, I imported from my 850. I selected everything to bring in. The waypoints are my favorites.
Below Waypoints, there a place called Tracks. Expanding tracks I get multiple entries like, "ACTIVE LOG:23 DEC 2008 10:04" Expanding the 23 DEC entry, I get a Points level and under that "ACTIVE LOG 23 DEC 2008 10:04-0" thru 10:04-2182 (that's the entire trip - the gps was turned on the entire trip).

At the same level of Points is a level named Path. When Path is selected and I double-click on the "ACTIVE LOG:23 DEC 2008 10:04" Earth zooms in on the first logged point and shows a light blue path. Zooming out, I see the blue path for the entire trip. If you zoom out too far, the blue path disappears.

When you play around with the timeline control that will appear when you hover the mouse over the upper left of the map, you can simulate the trip from beginning to end (even with a delay where we stopped for gas, dinner).

I haven't figured the play control out competely though. I think you can control the range of points to be played.

I didn't answer your question about waypoints. Yes, the waypoints display as blue flag with the waypoint name next to it. There's no action when clicking on the waypoint.
Clicking on one of the track points on the map will display a popup like:
ACTIVE LOG: 23 DEC 2008 10:04-825
Longitude: -87.318094
Latitude: 41.362818
Altitude: 717.979 ft
Speed: 66.2 mph
Heading: 163.5
Time: 2008-12-23T20:20:51Z

Wow, I wonder why you 850 is gettting along with Google Earth so much better than my 250. I think I'll try downloading the 250 into another copy of Google Earth on a different computer, just in case it's the computer system and not a 250 issue.

I can't get Google Earth to play nice with my 265wt either. I get a parsing error when it tries to load "Current.gpx" and GE won't even "see" my 265wt.

Well, I have an update to the issue and a little bit of good news. I connected my 250 to a different computer with GE5 and told it to download everything. This time it did indeed download everything and a track even appeared on the map. The bad news is that Google Earth immediately crashed, but this was different and seemed like more progress than with the other computer. I restarted Google Earth, downloaded the data again and this time all was working, I could see my track log and my waypoints even had meaningful information next to the flags. And when it downloaded the tracks this time I wasn't told that there were zero points in the track logs.

So now the first question that came to my mind was what was different about the two systems. But before pondering that too much I decided to try the nuvi 250 with the first computer again. And this time it worked! sort of! What I ended up with was a message that my track logs had 3000+ points in them (not 0), I could see the track logs on the map, but my waypoint flags still had no text near them.

I'm thinking that perhaps the waypoint problem is due to my having downloaded the waypoints without text before and it's not replacing the old waypoints. So I need to do a little more experimenting to see if I can clear the old waypoint data and then try again.

I don't know what had caused the original problem, but my suggestion to anyone having the problem is to use your GPS to get more data in the track log and try again. And, of course, if anyone can figure out what is going wrong when we can't download waypoints ot tracks, please post the information.

By the way, when it works the Google Earth information display seems to me nicer than looking at the tracklog in Mapsource. Mapsource may still have it's uses (particularly when I'm on the road and don't have an Internet connection), but Google Earth will be my first choice for going over track logs.

I am having similar issues with the NuVi 200W. When attempting to import anything whatsoever, it is not finding the Unit (although Garmin's software will).

Any suggestions welcome!

This is a great idea. Thanks for the info. I have a memory like that..lol.

ohwogo nuvi 750

Does your camera record the lat/long???

thanks!

I loaded it on another machine and saw the check box to avoid the toolbar but I didn't see any way to avoid Google Chrome.

I just used the "check for updates" option in the Help menu while running the older version of Google Earth. It just downloaded the update, with no options for attached spamware.