| Tuesday, June 13, 2006 |
17:55 - Earth-mo-tron
http://earth.google.com/earth4.html
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Google Earth Beta 4.
The big news—for me, at least—is that there's a ton more high-res imagery, including lots of Alaska (much of the Alaska Highway is specifically overlaid with sequential high-res bits, meaning they made a concerted effort) and a nice big strip that covers the town where I grew up.
Less good, to me, is the new interface. I liked having the mouse controls right down at the middle center, so I could drag/pan around the field and not have to move the mouse a lot to get to the controls for rotation and tilt. Now that the controls are all up in the top right corner, I have to move the mouse a whole long way—though it's also made me start to use the modifier-key equivalents (Shift+scroll for tilt, Command+scroll for rotate, etc). And why is the tilt slider horizontal now?
Biggest feature I want that still isn't in it: rivers. C'mon! I want rivers!
UPDATE: The beta has some serious performance issues, including what appear to be memory leaks, and its behavior regarding mouse clicks and drags is unpredictable and weird. I'm going back to the stable released version for now—because the updated high-res content is independent of the version of the browser, and that's the stuff I really want.
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Brian Tiemann
