Du nouveau sur l'API Google Maps! As many of you have already noticed, we recently added European maps to the Google Maps API. This update includes maps for France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Norway, Ireland, Poland, Sweden, and more. The European maps are automatically available to anyone who uses v2 of the API. If you're using v1 you won't see them, which is yet another reason everyone should upgrade.
We've also added translations to the API so you can get the map controls, tooltips, and copyrights in your own language. Just add "hl=XX" to your <script> tag, where XX is the ISO639 two-letter code for that language. For example, German has the code de, so use <script
src="http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&v=2&hl=de&key=abcdefg"> to get zoom controls that say "Verkleinern" instead of "Zoom out". We currently have translations for Japanese (ja), French (fr), German (de), Italian (it), Spanish (es), Catalan (ca), Basque (eu) and Galician (gl). We'll announce more new languages in the coming weeks.
Please let us know if you see any issues/problems with the new maps via the discussion forum or our feedback form.
Props to Esa from the forum for predicting the European tile launch as far back as last Friday!
