Google Earth/Mac: second beta

[mmcirvin]

Though you wouldn't know it from the download page, there's now a second beta of Google Earth for the Mac, mostly a bug-fix release. It feels to me as if they improved the performance a little, and street labels behave a little better, though many bugs remain and it's not substantially different in appearance.

There have also been some recent imagery and data improvements on the back end; Google Earth is once again ahead of Google Local in some places.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Actually, I'm not sure how extensive the last round of backend revisions is; the one place I've found that is noticeably better is Heathrow Airport again (enter "Hatton Cross UK" and check out the magic roundabout with the triskelion shrubbery that I pointed to earlier; Google Earth now has it in super-high-res and the alignment with the map data is better).

Baseline Road in Boulder is still sinking into the earth's core.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

As reported on Google's blog, both Local and Earth now have extensive maps and imagery for the area around Torino, in celebration of the Olympics.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

You saw this, right? (Zoom all the way in.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yes, though I'd have liked it more if they actually had a database of place names and maybe some high-res imagery in there to make it more than a clever gag...

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...I think there's actually a Mars server for Google Earth, though you have to get one of the paid versions to access it.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...for the rest of us, there's always Celestia (http://www.shatters.net/celestia/) to cover the rest of the universe (the data that ships with it is of varying quality, but there are terrific Moon and Mars textures available for download elsewhere, and I've been adapting Steve Albers' Cassini-based, frequently-updated Saturn moon maps (http://laps.fsl.noaa.gov/albers/sos/sos.html) with some success).

People like to daydream about turning Celestia into a Google Earth-like networked app, but it would be hard to retrofit it at this point without a massive re-engineering. Google Universe would be a nice thing.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Google Earth and Google Local still remain different worlds to some degree. Google Earth has a huge amount of street map information for Europe that Google Local doesn't; but Google Local's extensive Japanese-language street atlas of Japan has no counterpart in Google Earth. (Granted, it would be hard to integrate; it's informationally dense enough that Japan doesn't even have a hybrid view in Google Local, which would probably require a wholesale overhaul of the map data to thin it out a little. And then there's the whole i18n question that Google doesn't seem to have faced head-on yet. Always using the local language works well enough as long as foreigners can suss out the local writing system, but there really ought to be a mechanism for going beyond that; even if they don't have a Chinese-language map of Boston, the capability to put one in ought to be there.)