Google has announced a revamping of Google Maps and it is much more than a few changes. It is a reworking of the entire Google Maps interface from the group up, designed to make Maps more intuitive for users.

One major change is users can now click on any area of a map, and Google will respond by showing you information about what is in the area that you could be interested in, such as restaurants, businesses, and hotels. This is designed to make it easy for visitors to see what is near a particular location, such as discovering what is located near a hotel when someone is visiting a city.

There is much more connection with Google+ and what they display on the map popups, meaning it is much more critical for businesses to make sure their Google+ page is active with correct information, including hours and photos, and user reviews of their business.

MORE:  Google Maps Gets a Brand New Look | ClickZ.

Having to manually apply the same features to near-identical elements can get tiresome. Fortunately, Dmitry Tsozik has a great trick for generating variants of an object or icon

This article first appeared in issue 234 of .net magazine – the world’s best-selling magazine for web designers and developers.

Have you ever thought how awesome it would be to remove all repetitive routines from your daily design work? Or how to get build some kind of graphic assets library in Photoshop – similar to Flash, Illustrator, After Effects and other Adobe apps? And wouldn’t it be great to have a couple more hours a day to add final touches to your designs?

In this tutorial, we’ll attempt to address all three questions, exploring a cool trick that enables you to work on any number of variations of an image at once. This workflow is extremely useful for games assets, and for GUI designers creating icons. It enables you to work on one object, save it, and let Photoshop distribute all the changes you’ve made to any number of variant copies.

If you’re familiar with Smart Objects, you already know that you can have multiple instances of one element. This tutorial will show you how to use Smart Objects in an even smarter way. I developed the technique trying to mimic an awesome workflow in After Effects, and it turns out that it works pretty well in Photoshop, too.

MORE:   Design 100 objects at once in Photoshop | Tutorial | .net magazine.

Three months after hackers working for a cyberunit of China’s People’s Liberation Army went silent amid evidence that they had stolen data from scores of American companies and government agencies, they appear to have resumed their attacks  using different techniques, according to computer industry security experts and American officials.

The Obama administration had bet that “naming and shaming” the groups, first in industry reports and then in the Pentagon’s own detailed survey of Chinese military capabilities, might prompt China’s new leadership to crack down on the military’s highly organized team of hackers — or at least urge them to become more subtle.

But Unit 61398, whose well-guarded 12-story white headquarters on the edges of Shanghai became the symbol of Chinese cyberpower, is back in business, according to American officials and security companies.

MORE:   Chinese Hackers Resume Attacks on U.S. Targets – NYTimes.com.

If only all brands made such contemporary and edgy digital content. Unfortunately, they don’t.

No doubt, digital drek is common, but fear not! If brands avoid these seven deadly sins of digital — which are as annoying as 10 straight head-on ads and as passé as an Avril Lavigne concert — they’ll be well on their way to success.

Corporate tone on social media

Kudos to companies like Kraft and Lowe’s that engage consumers with two-way conversations and social media teams. Both understand social media is not about posting $2 off coupons for cheese or lawn chairs that you have to buy right this minute. They post items that engage consumers and humanize their brand by acting like normal people and less like a car sale at the end of the month. It’s less about “sell, sell, sell” and more about “hello, hello, hello.”

MORE: The 7 deadly sins of digital marketing – iMediaConnection.com.

A cloud of common sense just landed on Google, and instead of offering users separate storage caps for Google Drive, Gmail, and Google+ photos, the sultan of search has decided to offer up 15GB of unified storage for free. In doing so, users are in complete control of how much each of Google’s cloud services can hold, which is particularly great if you’re deeply invested in Drive and/or Google+ Photos, two services that were previously limited to 5GB combined.

“With this new combined storage space, you won’t have to worry about how much you’re storing and where,” Google stated in a blog post.

MORE: Going Full Circle: Google Users Get 15GB Shared Across Gmail, Drive, and Google+ | Maximum PC.

In what may be the first move toward a federal shutdown of the wildly popular online currency known as Bitcoin, the Department of Homeland Security today issued an order that has restricted the transfer of funds in and out of Mt. Gox, the Bitcoin exchange that handles some 60 percent of the transactions.

A creation of bank-fearing techies, Bitcoins are now worth more than $1 billion, and consumer interest has been skyrocketing. For more background, read our Bitcoin explainer.

The DHS is focusing on Dwolla, an online payment system sort of like PayPal that has become a popular way for Bitcoin users to transfer money to and from Mt. Gox. A Dwolla spokesman confirmed to BetaBeat that DHS and the US District Court for the District of Maryland have issued a “seizure warrant” for funds associated with the companys Mt. Gox account, which is known as Mutum Sigillum.

MORE: And So It Begins: The Feds Target Bitcoin Transactions | Mother Jones.

Gladstone, Missouri is the next city to get Google’s ultra-fast broadband service, Google Fiber.

The news comes days after Google announced Fiber would be coming to the tiny town of Shawnee, Kansas. Google has also added Austin, Texas, and Provo, Utah, to the growing-list of Fiber-enabled communities in the past two months.

via Google Fiber Comes to Gladstone, Missouri.

The team at Phonesuit wants to iPhone 5 users with extra battery power, but they don’t want to cramp your already existing iPhone case’s style. So, the company released an external battery that works alongside any case. Best of all, it fits right in your pocket.

MORE: Tiny iPhone Charger Fits in Your Pocket.

Sam Hampton-Smith shows how to use CSS3 transitions and animations to create a kinetic typography motion graphic piece, timed to match an HTML5 audio clip

Kinetic typography is a popular way to add impact to a song or audio clip by accentuating the lyrics or script to emphasize phrases, build suspense or help tell a story. The usual method is to set type in Photoshop or Illustrator and use After Effects or Apple Motion to animate words, revealing them in time to the music.

In this tutorial, we’ll use kinetic typography to create a simple conceptual art piece, timed to a song provided by power pop band, Be Like Pablo. Rather than using After Effects, we’ll take advantage of CSS3 animations and transitions to create the piece with standard web tools: HTML5 and CSS3 for the animation and audio and a smattering of JavaScript (we’re using jQuery but you could use straight JS if you prefer) to add classes to various elements at appropriate times.

MORE: Make a kinetic typography video with CSS | Tutorial | .net magazine.

We just recently taped a new round of webmaster videos, and I thought this video deserved a full-fledged blog post. This is my rough estimate as of early May 2013 of what search engine optimizers SEOs and webmasters should expect in the next few months:

via What to expect in SEO in the coming months.