In a very generous move, Bjørn Sandvik has open sourced the code for his Thematic Mapping Engine (TME) under a GPLv3 license.

This is great news for developers looking to add intelligence to data in their map mashups. Bjørn announced the news on his blog, and he has a succinct description of TME:

The engine takes statistical data, spatial features and thematic mapping parameters as input and returns a KMZ file. This file can be viewed in Google Earth, or other geobrowsers supporting the KML standard. TME can be accessed from a web interface or a PHP script.

The engine can also be used as an API, and Bjørn has put together a PDF User’s Guide. Before you get started, note that TME has the following requirements:

• PHP 5
• MySQL 5+
• Apache HTTP Server
• Ext JS 2.1
• Google Earth Plug-in

In addition to TME, Bjørn has also released an Ext JS extension for the Google Earth API, which generates an browser interface similar to that of Google Earth.

Nicely done, Bjørn!

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Every once in awhile you see one API provider making use of APIs from another. This is the case with the eBay Developers Program, who have announced the new eBay API Release Calendar. The calendar is itself a mashup, having been developed using the Google Calendar API. The resulting app is simple but works well: it’s color-coded to distinguish the significance of dates that correspond to each event.

As Laurel Kline noted in the announcement:

In the Month view, you get an overview of everything released or enforced that month. Click the Agenda tab and you can use it as a checklist for adopting upcoming features. Click the event and a detail balloon pops up. You can also copy that event to your own calendar. Since it’s powered by Google Calendar, you can subscribe to it just like any other public calendar. Subscribe just to the High Impact calendar, or subscribe to all of them.

As with this mashup, the Google Calendar API enables the development of client applications for updating and viewing customized online calendars. The API also provides event search capabilities. For more, see our Google Calendar API profile and our list of 29 example mashups. And our API directory includes a variety of eBay APIs.

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The Calling All Innovators Contest from ProgrammableWeb sponsor Nokia is offering app developers $35K in prizes for building creative applications for the Nokia mobile development platform (which reaches the world’s largest audience of mobile device owners). The contest, which ends next week, is organized into three categories:

• Eco-Challenge: tools to minimize the environmental impact of mobile use, and help people make sustainable choices. Examples include charger reminders, learning applications, navigation info, and recycling tips.
• Emerging Markets: services for those in developing countries, for what’s known as the Next Billion mobile users. Health information, low-cost infotainment, SMS-driven apps, literacy and agricultural assistance can help in an increasingly connected world.
• Technology Showcase: your snappiest and showiest killer app, anything that can run on an S60 or Series 40 phone, or Nokia Internet tablet.

All the details on applications guidelines and prizes are found here, and tutorials for a quick start are available in each of the categories. The applications are due by December 15th. Finalists in each category will be flown to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, in February of 2009, where the winner will be announced.

Mashup developers with their rapid development skills should be inspired by the tight deadline, and Nokia-optimized mobile apps can be built using the same open technologies as web apps: XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Flash Lite is also supported. Get support from 4 million members at Forum Nokia, the world’s largest mobile developer community.

For our readers in Europe, the Nokia team will be at LeWeb ‘08 in Paris this week - stop in and talk to them about your mobile innovations.

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After much anticipation from the Mac community (both users and developers), Google has released the Mac version of its Google Earth Browser Plugin. As with the Windows-only previous release, the plugin allows users to view Google Earth within their web browser. The plugin is supported on Safari 3.1+ and Firefox 3.0+ on Mac OS X 10.4+ (PowerPC and Intel).

This means that developers can now include the Google Earth API (our Google Earth API Profile) on their mashups with the added benefit of giving Mac users access to the same features as Windows users. To get started, download the plugin by visiting any site that uses the API, such as the Hello Google Earth! example (note that the download is 46MB). You can find additional documentation and code examples by visiting the Google Earth API Developer’s Guide web site.

In honor of this release the Google geo team has release a new mapping-based game called Puzzler. For developers, Google’s Mano Marks points-out an added bonus: “it’s open source, so you’re free to adopt the code.” It’s our Mashup of the Day today.

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Did you ever want to have a quick-and-easy way to test-out an API without having to write code? Now with the YouTube API you can. They now offer developers this web-based interactive form which lets you explore and interact with the YouTube API. You can setup and test API calls directly: choose operations, specify parameters, and see the Atom, RSS or JSON results.

As Google’s Stephanie Liu notes in the YouTube Developer API Blog, having a tool like this serves a number of useful functions:

Build query strings, experiment with the different feeds, and even make authenticated queries using AuthSub. This is also a great way to help debug problems with the API and compare responses against what you are seeing in your code.

In the past we’ve looked at a dozen interactive API test tools. These come from vendors from Facebook to Amazon as well as much smaller startups.

While these can be handy in many cases, they’ve proven to be hard to standardize across API because of the diversity of REST approaches out there. Each vendor is forced to roll their own, part of the reason why only a handful of vendors offer these at this point. Hopefully we’ll see more of these over time.

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