Google Earth Mac Beta
After an evening of trying out the non-public beta of Google Earth for Mac OS X I must say… YES! Finally. 
I, and a lot of Mac owners, have been eager to run this piece of software on a Mac. And now we can. Not officially, because the download page at earth.google.com still mentions Apple Macintosh computers are not supported at this time (but we are working on it).
And they definitely are working on it. See the screenshot below.
All I can say right now, is:
- It works. On my iBook 12″ (Tiger inSideTM) I can spin and zoom the Globe quite happily without resorting to *hacks*, Virtual Desktop, Remote Desktops, etc.
- It’s buggy. It froze on me a couple o’ times. With all the options turned up, it hampers. A DirectX option on OS X???? Polygons are garbled. The app icons look like s… Images in popups don’t seem to work. And there’s probably more.
- It’s NOT finished. So it is not expected to work YET! DO NOT COMPLAIN it is a non-public beta that happened to leak. Otherwise Google would’ve made publicly available.
- It’s great. If you get motion-sickness too easily, don’t mess with the scroll-pad.
- This apps Useragent is ‘GoogleEarthMac/LT3.1.0371.0′. So the ‘network link’ people know now.
- It’s a first for Google! As in: A first major software ‘leak’. A first major application on OS X (GMail Notifier was an excercise).
- Compatibility? You’ll probably need a current (hefty) Apple product with the latest OS (X) and patches. But we’ll know for sure once they release it.
- …
So how do YOU obtain a working version?
You’ll have to wait a little longer! Google is working on it. How long? Maybe a few days or months.
Update: It’s here. Go get it from Google!
Sidenote: If you manage to install GE on a Mac. You may want to look at some spectacular impact craters on Earth’s surface. Download the kmz’s and open them in GE. Enjoy!
Update: Stefan from go.ogleearth.com has been asked nicely by the Google people to take down the download links. He also has a more in-depth review of GE on Mac OS X. I haven’t gotten any comment from Google, yet.
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3 Responses to “Google Earth Mac Beta”
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ThinkLemon » Blog Archive » Google Earth for Mac OS X around the corner… Says:
December 10th, 2005 at 2:51 am[...] Contact « No Christmas for Sony Google Earth Mac Beta » [...]
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Le Weblog de Frederic Bezies » Blog Archive » Google Earth pour MacOS-X ? Says:
December 10th, 2005 at 2:35 pm[...] C’est en lisant ce blog que j’ai pu apprendre ceci, confirmant une rumeur qui courrait depuis quelques temps. [...]
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blog.seriot.ch » Blog Archive » Google Earth pour Mac (beta) Says:
December 13th, 2005 at 5:11 pm[...] Une version de Google Earth Beta pour Mac circule depuis quelques jours sur Internet : thinklemon.com. [...]