Jul 21, 2005
Wow. Mr. Mike told me about this program called World Wind, which "lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth". It's a big program, but it's really cool. But then just yesterday, I saw an icon on a co-worker's desktop that said "Google Earth" and I checked it out. Wow. It's the same kind of thing as World Wind, but it's a lot cooler because Google made it. Google has a way of making programs that are extremely useful and yet very slim and simple. So I tried it out and found my house and stuff like that. Really cool stuff here. #technology
The 3d buildings is a cool touch but will be better when Google is done with it. Supposedly they are rigging up trucks with lasers and cameras on them to drive the streets mapping buildings. So you will be able to get a true to life scale and full color 3d perspective in cities. Also check out googlearthhacks.com. Live weather radar overlays is probably the coolest thing. The flickr plugin is pretty cool too. It pulls the latest pictures of the area you are viewing from Flickr's photosharing site. Most of the stuff there is just placemarks to interesting sites but some of it is pretty cool.
On the WW side you can get all of the GE's imagery in WW, but until they fix their CPU usage issue it just can't compete. One downside to GE is that you can't run it offline because of the authentication thing it does when it starts up.
I'm hooked on this stuff.