Google Earth for Mac, developers wanted…

Or so it seems. Google wants a Senior Macintosh Developer – Mountain View and/or a Macintosh Developer – Mountain View. I suggest any Mac-developer have a go and bring us… Google Earth for Mac.

You may be very familiar with some of our desktop products including Google Earth, Google Desktop, Picasa, and Google Talk., the description says. Well, GTalk I can connect to with iChat for now. Picasa? iPhoto comes with the system. Google Desktop? There is a thing called Spotlight & Dashboard that come with Tiger already. So that leaves one much desired piece of software left… If I may trust my stats, it is the most requested item today. Though you may want to inquire with the Zeitgeist people upon application. (Found on Is Google Gearing Up for a Mac Software Assault?)

In another story dubbed: Desktop apps coming to the Web: Google. Google Maps lead engineer Lars Rasmussen is hinting at some developments under way, right now.

“Sometime in the future the now native client Google Earth application will be possible in a browser.”

A number of people are now working on a Linux port of Google Earth, but Rasmussen did not offer a release date.

… “compare the pain of getting Javascript code working on different browsers to the pain of porting C++ code from a PC to a Mac”

According to Rasmussen, Google’s design philosophy centres on end user loyalty not money, going beyond the browser’s lowest common denominator, to develop simple Web applications that are as dynamic as native applications, and to launch early and often to learn from users.

Well, … I don’t think any browser & JavaScript supports anything fully 3D like at the moment. I’m ignoring VRML. So if you could please release early a desktop application with similar capabilities as Google Earth. I’d be more than happy to be the user you learn from.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 18th, 2005 at 1:51 am and is filed under Apple, Desktop, General, Google, Google Earth, News, Utilities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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3 Responses to “Google Earth for Mac, developers wanted…”

1. VL-Tone Says:
   October 18th, 2005 at 6:20 am

   The Shockwave plug-in supports real 3d in a browser, it can drive a video card with OpenGL or DirectX (on windows) and falls back to a slow software renderer if it cannot make the former work (which unfortunately happens on some systems for some unclear reasons). I’m pretty fluent in Lingo (Macromedia Director/Shockwave scripting language)

   Shockwave is part of a standard Tiger install, but Safari/Shockwave has an unfixed bug where the 3d openGL viewport appear like 50 pixels higher than it should. With Director, I could produce stand-alone applications for Mac OS X, Classic and Windows (that wouldn’t have that bug).

   I guess that doing Google Earth in Shockwave would be relatively easy, download the map images and slap them on a sphere. Ok it’s more complicated than that but I think I could probably do it. The problem is, I don’t have a Windows machine so I don’t know how the Google Earth interface behaves.

2. Caspar Says:
   October 18th, 2005 at 6:51 pm

   @VL-Tone: How could I forget about Shockwave 3D! Although it apparently is standard issue on Tiger, it surely is not on Windows or Linux.

   If Google is building GE in a browser it’ll probably do so with standard JavaScript & XMLHttpRequest & … (Like mr. Rasmussen says). IMHO I don’t think they will rely on a technology from another company. Not unless they can buy that company. (With the Adobe/Macromedia merger, not very likely)

   I think the best bet is the open format VRML and/or its succesor X3D. But I have no clue what the limits of those technologies are, nor which browsers support what.

3. Ramon Says:
   December 6th, 2005 at 2:47 pm

   I think google is going back to making the same mistakes as microsoft.
   History should tell you a bit about what should really be done here, and the solution is already done by some flash programmer which I forgot his name… Here is the link dough.
   Position Closed hehe.
   http://www.neave.com/lab/flash_earth/
   ramonklown [[[at]]]] pop_dott_com.br

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