Google Earth Gets Update for Mac
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11.06.2006—Google has released an update for its popular Google Earth for Mac OS X. Google Earth is, of course, a tool for locating places around the world, acting as a sort of interactive 3D globe. It allows users to point and zoom into any place on the earth and provides satellite images and various pieces of information about the location. It also allows users to search for specific addresses and zoom into those addresses.
The new update brings the current free version to 4.0.2414.0. It adds creative tools, performance enhancements and various miscellaneous improvements.
On the creative side, it adds path and polygon drawing tools, which were previously not available in the free version. These allow users to draw annotations on top of imagery, and these annotation overlays can be shared as KML or KMZ files. For performance, the new version improves the caching of 3D models and now allows for compressed textures on 3D models. Other improvements include:
- Improvements to printing, including printing of folders, search results and placeholders;
- New icons for easier navigation, plus new icon management capabilities;
- A new MSI installer for installing Google Earth more easily over networks;
- And the availability of premium modules for free with a Google Earth subscription, including premium printing, GIS data import and Widows Media animation export.
Google Earth is available as a free download for Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later. Google lists as a hardware requirement a 3D-capabile video card, but the latest release does, in fact, work on Intel-based Mac models that lack dedicated graphics cards.
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About the author: Dave Nagel is the executive editor for 1105 Media's educational technology online publications and electronic newsletters. He can be reached at [email protected].
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