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Google Earth Launching For Free
Nathan Weinberg writes "Google launches Keyhole 3 today, rebranded Google Earth, and are dumping the subscription rate (except for a $20/year "plus" versions with prettier pictures) available soon at earth.google.com. The program lets you fly around a 3D globe, with overhead satellite photos, tilted 45-degree photos, 3D rendered buildings, and overlays that display everything from roads to hotels to bike routes. I have a lot of info and screenshots at InsideGoogle, and Search Engine Watch has a big writeup. With yesterday's Google Video release, this is shaping up to be a major week for the search giant."
It is like NASA World Wind, but better.
Wow, this is great. The images are better than what they have for Google Maps, at least for my house (I can zoom in a lot farther). And the tilting and rotating are really fun. They have a few famous sightseeing places included by default, and just rotating and zooming around the Three Sisters or Yosemite was almost breathtaking. Integrating with their direction and local services is probably a good idea, though I doubt I'll use it much, but the images themselves are very well done. Good job, Google.
Its actually pretty addictive for a GIS geek like myself. Plus it was neat to have it help me plan my camping trip this weekend.
It totally blows away any geographical user interface ESRI or Autodesk or anyone else has. They should be embarrassed with their current ArcIMS and MapGuide products - such rudimentary interfaces and poor performance.
Whats even more interesting is the Google Earth Enterprise suite. Being able to load my own satellite data and GIS data into this would be interesting. But like I've said before in other posts about google maps, the biggest problem for GIS groups would be the lack of an "Identify" tool (perhaps its there but I havent seen it in any of the screenshots). And still no scale bar at the bottom either, though they do have a north arrow.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
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Well, I guess Slashdot already have a quite complete coverage of Google stuff, but if you wan't to beat the rush for some hours I recommend the Google Blog (with RSS)
It works under wine!!!! Version 20050111-r1. I had to switch to fluxbox after it repeatedly crashed kde, it uses qt so maybe that was problems, its also somewhat unstable and requires working opengl
I was a Keyhole subscriber for a little over a year before google bought them.
As nice of an improvement the Google Earth software is, overall the product has become worse since google bought it.
The overall resolution has been decreased from many covered areas and super high-res areas have been removed entirely.
You used to be able to clearly make out the exact shapes of cars in the SF Bay Area, now they are blurry colored blobs. In the super high res areas, you could pretty much identify the model of most cars and sometimes even make out individual people.
If you are a long time subscriber like me, google placates you with an option to login to the 'legacy' database.. but if you are new.. no dice.
Doesn't that seem strange? I really hope they reintegrate the higher res data, it is profoundly better.
I'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt that when they increased their coverage area they had technical issues with the highest res data, but it's been awhile now and they havn't changed their stance of "Oh.. umm yea..login to legacy.." since the new primary database came out.. so I'm fairly worried.
Google have closed their downloads for Earth.
See http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4659.html for mirrors.
Not sure which version is the latest, but MajorGeeks have "Google Earth 3.0.0336 Beta"