And here we go again, Google release a beta API that lets you display a virtual globe on your website and the world goes ooh wow! We have had a World Wind Java API for over a year and have many users already.
There is a big difference between our API and theirs though, with ours you can do anything you want and its truly free, check out the information and demos on WorldWind Central.
The above video is from the applet embedded in this webpage
Oh and don’t forget to read these two pages if you do want to use the non Open Source API, Google Privacy Policy and the Google Maps API ToS, and don’t worry I’m sure your soul will be happy with the millions of others in the patented ‘Don’t be Evil ectoplasmic to server powering energy converter’.
What I really like about Google Earth is that it is quite more responsive on my computer than World Wind (I only have an integrated graphics accelerator). Also, with World Wind downloads often stall.
However, WW has some nice features (and imagery) that GE does not. I heard that the download problem will be solved in 1.4.1, but it’s been an awfully long time since 1.4.0 and still no news of 1.4.1 …
Do you have any idea about when will 1.4.1 be released? (I’ve seen that a Java version is in development, too, but the demo I tried was so terribly choppy and slow that it was completely unusable on my slow computer).
1.4.1 eta is still ‘soon’, the download code is much better, it runs very smoothly on my PC, we have only one major blocker, and someone has just volunteered to fix that so ‘soon’ may actually be sooner rather than later.
That’s good news, I’m waiting eagerly! :)