geoLibro.org

From Bull’s rambles: More NASA World Wind based GIS software…

I haven’t tried Dapple yet (would have to drag the old Toshiba out of whatever box it got put into), but I wanted to register the news. I’m especially excited to see that WorldWind isn’t being forgotten about. I always did like it better than Google Earth in most respects, but I fear that it’s just not developing fast enough.

Anyway, James Fee has posted a quick review of it which might help evaluate it (except he seems to think people will be “scared off from the non-Windows appearance that it gives off,” which is either testament to how well the NASA guys designed the WorldWind GUI [is that a magnified dock hanging from the title bar?] or how self-restrictive Windows adherents are).

Come on, Google. Why you wanna make us do all the work? Google launches Explore Shakespeare with Google and asks us to “take a literary field trip” by downloading Google Earth. Well, that would be step 1, perhaps (could be WorldWind, after all). But since you have all of those computers and all of those dollars, why not geotag the texts themselves so we can click straight out of the text into Earth or Maps? Or get a robot to do it. An entire summer of code and no Classic literature geotagging robot? Not even a Roomba mod? Sheesh.

Besides, it’s sort of been done by humans already anyway. Plug it into your fancy machines already, Google.

The Google Earth Blog made an announcement today, maybe you heard:
The most interesting part in my opinion is that there’s a new Beta version (build 1563, I think) available for Mac and Linux. Google Earth Pro (Windows only) doesn’t seem to have been updated as of this writing.

I can’t tell if they tried to make the new UI OS X-ified or KDE-ified. Maybe its GNOME-ified, I guess I sort of don’t care. It will still burn the eyes of Mac users.

Take comfort, though, in the news that Google SketchUp (née Sketchup) free is now out for Mac. Now go spend fifteen hours building digital models of that birdhouse you promised your first-born. (Or use it like I plan to: build interactive, intuitive models of campus and campus libraries to help usher students to and from the great stores held at Purdue University Libraries.)

From Ogle Earth: Google Earth Linux will be native, after all

It doesn’t look like we’ll be putting any *nix machines in the GIS Lab in EAS (except on the triple-boot MacBook Pro I intend to bring with me to campus), but this is still good news for a decent amount of the Purdue computing community, no?

(By the way, if you’re interested in having Linux support [for GRASS, for example} in the lab, please let me know.)