off topic: earth.google.com

[Norman Barker]

-----Original Message-----
From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:MAPSERVER-USERS at lists.umn.edu]On
Behalf Of Brent Fraser
Sent: Friday, July 22, 2005 3:58 PM
To: MAPSERVER-USERS at lists.umn.edu
Subject: Re: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] off topic: earth.google.com


Flavio,

  Google Earth (not to be confused with Google Maps) is more than just mind
blowing.  In my business (Satellite imagery sales and service) it's world
shaking.

The top ten things I like about Google Earth:

 1. It's free, with upgrades for a fee.
 2. The entire world (almost) is covered with pan-sharpened Landsat (15m
pixels).
 3. All (most?, some?) of Digital Globe's Quickbird imagery is shown (0.6m
pixels).
 4. The user-interface is dead simple.
 5. The fade-in/fade-out of vectors and annotation on zooming is great.
 6. The performance fantastic (like streaming video).
 7. It's 3d. You can tilt the world and fly thought canyons.
 8. It's even more 3d. It will render 3d objects such as buildings.
 9. You can overlay data (vectors and raster) from your computer.
10. You can connect to web data sources (like WMS with about 10 lines of
server-based scripting).

The application: http://earth.google.com (after install, do View -> Play
Tour)
The community: http://bbs.keyhole.com


Brent Fraser

<snip>

Everyone is saying it is amazing, and I like it, it is fun.  But you can't really 
do that much with the KWL service provider interface, and the streaming technology
is proprietary.  

When they release an API so that I can change the visual appearance of controls, add
my own gui panels, add processing functionality, then I will be really impressed!!

Norman