Placemarks

[mmcirvin]

The feature of Google Earth that I really wasn't conscious of before I saw it is the community placemarks. Obviously, like Wikipedia, it's a "seek corroboration before believing" sort of thing, but I think the next time I travel to a new place I'll poke around these first; for major cities they could basically function as a user-written tourist guide.

Google now has a Local app for MIDP-capable cell phones, but I'm starting to think that something like a small tablet PC with wifi running Earth would be a nice thing to carry with you, especially if you remember to pre-cache a list of free hotspots.

(On the other hand, even given the 3D driving-directions tours, the plain Google Maps view often ought to be superior to photographic maps for navigation. It ought to be possible to switch Google Earth to a 3D but otherwise unadorned map view, maybe with the maps painted on the terrain; that's the big thing that's missing from it.)

Comments

[acw.livejournal.com]

I don't know ... I keep wishing Google Earth had (a) a contour lines layer, (b) a photo date layer.

My favorite Google Earth discovery is on the plaza under the Kensico Dam, at 41o 04' 20" N, 73o 46' 03" W. The shot was taken in winter, and some (Association) football fan had paced out the word URUGUAY in the snow.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I keep wondering why they used dark purple lettering for "geographic feature" labels. When surrounded by the dark fuzzy shadow that is supposed to provide contrast, they're almost completely unreadable.

[acw.livejournal.com]

It must depend on the monitor; they are readable on mine.

If we're picking nits: no consistent labeling of rivers and streams; names of bodies of fresh water seem to live at the major outflow, not near the middle. Also there's the whole level-of-detail thing: they clearly have a set of heuristics for deciding how close you have to be to an object before its label is displayed. For cities, big cities get labeled at a greater distance than small cities, for example. But the user is given no control, and finding a named object by panning around where you know it must be can be really hard: sometimes they only display the name when the object is already filling most of the screen. What good is that?

None of this stops me from playing with it for hours on end, following rivers, looking for tops of hills, zooming on weird-looking doodads.

[acw.livejournal.com]

Oh, a great local example: look at how they label the Mystic Lakes. Can you make sense of that?