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Google Earth 4.3 Offers a Number of New Features

Posted by Zonk on from the it's-the-only-globe-we've-got-why-not-check-it-out dept.

GoogleWatch writes "Google's all excited for Earth day, and just in time there's a new version of Google Earth available. 4.3 offers up revamped navigation controls, 3-D photo-realistic buildings in major cities, and time-lapse views of sunsets and sunrises. Also new in Google Earth 4.3 is access to the street view movies found in Google Maps. Just click any of the camera icons and the familiar street view window will pop up. The sunrise and sunset movies are also quite impressive. Fly to a location you'd like to see and click the "sun" button in the toolbar. That will bring up a small timeline graphic and you can either hit play or drag the timeline slider to watch the day unfold."

6 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Great but... by ccguy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I love Google Earth but I think they should revisit their decision of replacing new images with older ones if they have better resolution.

    I'm sure that's a good decision but a city like New York, but in areas recently developed it just doesn't make sense.

    1. Re:Great but... by ImdatS · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Unfortunately, as funny as it may sound, this is the reality in most big corporations: If you don't dare to make decisions (and to bear the risks involved), you setup a committee or council. In that case, nobody is to blame if the council decisions proves to be wrong in the end.

      I know what I am talking about...

  2. New Images by Thelasko · · Score: 3, Insightful

    How about updating the images. They must be five years old. Things change, buildings get built and torn down.

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  3. More Web 2.0 anachronisms by heroine · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Well they're certainly photos of buildings, just not realistic photos of buildings.

    Well, they certainly have free models on 3D warehouse. They're just all in a format Google Earth can't read without a plugin for a commercial operating system.

    They certainly have 3D graphics, just not the 5 lines of code that it would take to support 3D anaglyphs. Everyone's killing themselves stacking screen shots to work without this simple feature.

  4. Re:Other views? by oakgrove · · Score: 2, Insightful
    I have to say, this was one of the easiest installs of a random program on Linux I have ever seen. I just downloaded the one file, GoogleEarthLinux.bin, opened a terminal, did a chmod +x GoogleEarthLinux.bin, typed ./GoogleEarthLinux.bin and hit next, next, next and was done.

    Seriously, all Linux program installations should be this easy. Oh, and the program is great.

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  5. Re:Other views? by oakgrove · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yeah, actually, I've used thousands of deb packages. The Google Earth binary was not one of them. It was still super easy to install. Most Linux binaries that you download are anything but easy. That was the point. We should be able to download a binary that isn't a pre-rolled deb or rpm or whatever package and install it as easily as this was.

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