I got hold of an unauthorized beta some time ago, but this official release is, not surprisingly, much smoother and more effective. It's still pretty much of a grind on my machine, with herky-jerky movement when trying to scroll maps and so on, but it works pretty well overall. I enjoyed the flight from Boston to Wuhan.
As some people remarked when the pre-release version leaked, the heavily Aquafied UI is kind of ugly, and looks like something from the earliest days of Mac OS X. In general, it's a little awkward providing a unified user interface to this much information, and it can be hard to figure out how to find the layer that you want to turn on or (especially) off. It can also be frustrating when the computer's cranking so hard rendering layers that it gets difficult to scroll and click on the lists (the only times when this has been a real problem are when I have 3D buildings turned on and am looking at a skyscraper-filled city from a fairly low angle).
But it's an extremely impressive effort, especially given that they're giving a lot away for free.
Command-G puts the mouse control into an entertaining mode, especially if you are fond of flight simulators but annoyed by all that irritating physical and technical realism. (Command-T gets you out of it. It's probably Control-G and Control-T in the PC version, since they haven't changed the text in the prefs panel.)
I've also been playing with the unofficial beta for a while, and I'm glad to see that the bug where your whole system (including mouse cursor motion) would grind down to a halt every time it needed to redraw complex scenery is fixed.
The GUI is still not very pretty, as you remarked, which is apparently because they're using a Mac port of the Qt GUI engine, and using Unix GUI toolkits on anything but Unix is a surefire way to look ugly. I can only assume this means a Linux port will follow shortly, though, which should make some people happy.
They also changed the icons from the previous version, and the new ones are really a rush job. One of the rotate icons is all off-center, and the pressed look of the icons just doesn't make any sense and doesn't look pressed in any way.
Interface quibbles aside, it's still a great toy. I used it to make this, which is a mapping of locations used in one of my favourite comics of all time, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou. The KMZ data file is available here, and my quick-hack KML/KMZ online viewer is here.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2006-01-10 10:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-11 05:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-11 07:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-11 07:17 am (UTC)But it's an extremely impressive effort, especially given that they're giving a lot away for free.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-11 05:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-12 08:29 am (UTC)The GUI is still not very pretty, as you remarked, which is apparently because they're using a Mac port of the Qt GUI engine, and using Unix GUI toolkits on anything but Unix is a surefire way to look ugly. I can only assume this means a Linux port will follow shortly, though, which should make some people happy.
They also changed the icons from the previous version, and the new ones are really a rush job. One of the rotate icons is all off-center, and the pressed look of the icons just doesn't make any sense and doesn't look pressed in any way.
Interface quibbles aside, it's still a great toy. I used it to make this, which is a mapping of locations used in one of my favourite comics of all time, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou. The KMZ data file is available here, and my quick-hack KML/KMZ online viewer is here.