I kept getting ready to post about Google’s 3rd incarnation of Keyhole – Google Earth, but I can’t get it installed on a workstation with a decent video card for some screen caps and video clips to make a fancy, media rich review. Plus, Google has taken the download offline because of what I imagine are bandwidth issues. I spent a fair amount of time trying to move preferences, caches, registry keys, etc. to another computer, but Google’s servers won’t recognize any newer installations. Damn, must be an IP thing.
Like Greg, I can’t help but drool over this great app. There’s even innuendo on the website about a mac version…
I’m still a little partial to Nasa’s World Wind, which I think has more elegant movement and navigation, but it’s also not available for the mac. World Wind is open – so anyone could conceivably build layers to use with it. With some of the options in Google Earth, it looks like community add-ons will be available soon.
It’s interesting to see two (three if Microsoft actually starts shipping products) versions of the Digital Earth developing. While I hope for the success of World Wind, I couldn’t pick a better company to work on the private version.
A few gems from Google Earth:
- Mt. St. Helens with terrain turned on at a 45 degree view
- 3D buildings in Portland or Seattle
- Driving directions. Wow. It’s like taking the trip twice!
- It uses Google results inside the maps!
A few things I’d like to see changed:
- the camera rotation it counter-intuitive – you spin the map instead of your view
- you can’t change zoom on the fly
- It uses Google results inside the maps
- Maximum disk cache of 512MB
- not yet available for the mac
One of my co-workers said that he was able to download an OS X version this weekend.
Really? you yanking my chain? I can’t find it! I want it!