And before anyone comments on my use of US English spellings in the post, that's because Philipp selected US English as the "official" language of Google Blogoscoped! :-P

<< at least localize them properly for us Brits! >>

Agreed! *protest!*

hehehe

Tony, is there any method to make a co-ord "my default" ??

/pd: From what I've seen, it always seems to remember my last viewed location when I restart the application.

Heh, I completely agree. I still use the Gmail app (the UK one is called Google Mail and was released a while later) and the Google Maps one.

You'd think that when Google has an office in London, that they could easily task someone with translating the strings, or even better – creating an algorithm. US English -> UK English must be one of the most simply translations, and Google – the powerhouse of algorithms should be doing these things almost instantly.

Even if Google created an algorithm that wasn't perfect, it would still be quicker for a translator to check a sentence then it would to translate it completly.

Google products almost all beta. In the real world, beta product means tester, waster.

Google should learn some from Apple and Microsoft. Customer need prefect product not free product. I can pay, if the product perfect and save my time. And do not want a free product waste my time and make me angry.

I have to disagree there Hong, when Gmail first came out and it was a GIGABYTE of space for FREE I would gladly take a beta product with a few downtimes over paying for Yahoo Mail Plus which at that time didn't have that much space. My friend said "I already have 2mb with hotmail and it is enough for me, I won't change" but after I showed him the search and chat he switched and is now using 180mb which is a lot more than 2mb. Furthermore I like the fact its beta as features are constantly being added so you never get bored and if the competition are begining to catch up (or in most cases bltently copy you) the new features knock them down again. Sorry Hong but that does not apply to everyone. google made betas fun and since GMail I have tested numerous thing such as Joost, Firefox Grand Paradiso (which is Alpha) and Google TiSP.

Aha, I have packed a Cache file for my friends in Hong Kong.
In fact , I dump the prefs.dat and prefsext.dat in to Hex and start hacking on it. Seems the starting string is opaque, but some in prefsext.dat is easily hackable.

patten looks like
Checksum ??
(LAT | LNG)
Checksum ??
(NULL delimiter) (1 byte strlen = n) (n byte ascii text for business search) ...
(NULL delimiter) (1 byte strlen = n) (n byte ascii text for location search)

I may dump a whole package to play with ...

BTW – today Google released first fully localized Polish version of Google Earth and what's more important now searching for Polish addresses works – both in Google Earth and Google Maps. I can just go to maps.google.com, type my address and address of some other place in Warsaw and Google offers me a driving instructions and etc. I'm so happy :)