Very Cool- Real time live desktop of the earth or planets for apple computers

[IChing]

This is made by a brilliant 17 year old Californian but only for OSX
sorry Microsoft users.


OSXplanet is a cocoa program that is based on the popular program, xplanet (by Hari Nair). It is able to generate live images of the earth as well as other planets in the solar system with additional informations such as the current clouds, storms, satellites, volcanos, earthquakes and times and locations of cities. It is free and it updates every 1 min to whatever time you choose. I've had this on my desktop and it is very accurate. I no longer need to go to NOAA or US geological to check out what is happening on the planet just to reaffirm the details now. It also tracks the space station and the hubble telescope if you want it to.


Screenshot example



or you can view planets as viewed from earth, mars, venus etc.

[IChing]

1. sorry I forgot the link: enjoy

http://otte.ucsc.edu/~gabriel/osxplanet/main.html

[BlueStorm]

2. Too bad they don't have it for Windows Me...n/t

[Dead_Parrot]

5. For M$, try "Desktop Earth"

Similar beast, but just the one planet.

http://codefromthe70s.org/desktopearth_dl.asp

[BlueStorm]

7. Yeah I tried to get it on my computer but I get this

thing that says that it can't install and that I have to update my installer pack or some shit like that.

Blue

[Dead_Parrot]

11. Bugger...

Try posting the error message in the computer help forum (here) - I'm not that good on ME, but someone might be able to help out...

[madokie]

12. I like it. quick download and install too

[CrazyOrangeCat]

3. wow!

[NastyRiffraff]

4. Ooh, thanks!

Going to download it now.

[lapfog_1]

6. xplanet has been around for more than 10 years now.

developed for Unix system (x in xplanet refers to the X windowing system and many "X" applications start with the letter "x").

It's what gives you the flat map of the earth with the current sunlit and dark areas (based on the current time and date of the year). Adding cloud cover and storm tracking and other real time events is a cool idea. It might incorporate near real time satellite images, but then again, might not.

[IChing]

8. IT does track accurately the additional data

You can change the perspective from a earth view to a square view.

you want the other view then here you go................


it is new,
give me the link to your ........"10 year old program"......before you poopaa it with the space station orbit....LOL
and this particular program has not been around for ten years this comes out of USC

If you don't like it
then don't comment.

[lapfog_1]

14. I was wrong...

it's almost 20 years old. Well, 17 to 18 at least.

From http://hpux.connect.org.uk/hppd/hpux/X11/Demos/xearth-1.1/readme.html

Copyright (C) 1989, 1990, 1993-1995, 1999 Kirk Lauritz Johnson

xplanet is based on xearth which was developed by Kirk Johnson of the Univ of Colorado.

Not poopaa (whatever that means)... rather just pointing out that what is so often "new" to the Microsoft or MacOS worlds is often something that the Unix world has already had for many, many years. Of course, OS-X is really FreeBSD under the hood.
It's nice to see some new features.

[Boo Boo]

9. Yup. That's the neat thing about OS X...

under the hood it is Unix, so porting all kinds of cool old Unix bits over to Mac OS is straight forward. OTOH, making it a Cocoa app means getting rid of all the X and replacing it with Apple's native graphics layer, so that was a bit of extra work. Mac OS ships with an X client, but most users probably don't even know its there. I suspect that the real grunt work as far as drawing maps and planets and so forth was done with OpenGL, so it probably wasn't too hard to port.

[niallmac]

10. Thank you IChing. I like it! n/t

[IChing]

13. You are welcome

Now you can see non political storms develop on the planet
that may become a political through intellectual incompetence,
social neglect, republican and corporate logic
and a lack of scientific understanding ie. Katrina.

I think the volcano thing is cool, check out the Volcano off of Italy and see the cloud spread,
also the earthquake pattern is easier to see in a world view ( i put mine at 3.5)
than from the USGS website, even though the data comes from them
and living in California I look to the data daily
so I know it is up to date.