Google Earth 4 appears to be out of beta as of the last few hours. The GE home page only talks about version 4 now. There is a new download version posted as well, with what looks to be small tweaks from the previous beta versions.
They have added a new 3D building layer that can automatically replace the generic, non-textured Google buildings with textured user supplied ones from the 3D warehouse.
There is also a new Yelp layer with user reviews of local resturants and so on.
In addition, Sketchup is now on version 6. One thing that struck me right away is there are tutorials and task sensative help available right away. Links to documentation and even How To videos are very easy to find. It looks like it will be much easier to get started with SketchUp for newbies.
TonyB |
Cool, along with new homepages for Google Earth and SketchUp. Cool! |
check out the cool download button:
http://earth.google.com/images/dl_button_sm.gif |
The Google Earth product page lists Windows 2000 and Windows XP as the required operating systems. There is no mention of Vista. They are serious on that one. The latest build runs just fine on my XP machine. It won't even load on my Vista machine. The previous Google Earth build, from late December or early January, did work for me on Vista.
There has been a lot of work done by some community members on textured buildings. Denver, Colorado is a good example. It's an interesting race between Google and Microsoft on the the textured buildings. Microsoft is taking a heavily automated approach. Google is relying heavily on users contributing.
I had fun last night texturing a SketchUp model of my barn and placing it in Google Earth. It was much easier than I expected.
TonyB |
