Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Google Earth

You know, I've had Google Earth on my desktop for a few months now. I think I originally downloaded it to check it out, took a play for a few minutes, thought it was stupid and then forgot about it. A few months later I was chatting with a friend and he said something like "Yea, I was playing with Google Maps for a few hours today" and I was like : "huh?". Yet a few months more went by until today and I don't know why I fired it up, but I've been playing with it for a few hours now and I finally get it. This thing is pretty fricken amazing! I went to the Pyramids, I saw the Eiffel Tower, I found my house, I looked over Europe and Russia and Japan and flew in and over Bagdad. I just can't stop looking at stuff. And I've been doing it by using my mouse. Just scolling back with my mouse wheel and flying along, connecting locations like I was neo in the Matrix.

If you haven't tried this thing, you should. If you haven't spent an hour playing with it, you haven't had that "wow" moment. In that case I advise you play with it some more.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I was addicted to Google Earth for a month or so, it is truely amazing (I really like plotting out my bike routes with it, though I wish I had the garmin cylcomputer GPS so I could stay on course). There was an article on engadget a couple of weeks ago about one of the Japanese car manufacturers was incorporating it into their GPS systems, which sounds like a great idea, though I was skeptical that their hardware wouldnt be able to render the images properly.

Speaking of google, have you messed around with gCalendar yet? I think they will yet again revolutionize another seemingly bland productivity application. It is still VERY raw, I can only sync my gCal TO my iCal, not vice versa (which would be the more useful of the two). But the appointment input protocol seems genuis to me. You can type something to the effect of, "Dinner with So-and-So at Django on 5/12 at 8pm" and it will block off that slot. It is also trying to include "appointment emails" through gmail (and I would guess is compatible with the Microsoft suite). Thought it might be of some interest.