- Cassini at Saturn Interactive Explorer: CASSIE is a wonderful 3D interactive application by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory that lets you visualize all of Cassini’s flybys of Saturn and its moons. It’s web-based, with plugins for Macs and Windows, and it looks delicious. It’s the sort of stuff I wish I had when I was a kid.
- iCool ’09: iPhoto ’09 appears to have implemented the georeferencing of photos — and then viewing them via geographic criteria — quite superbly, judging from the tutorial video. One thing that stood out for me is that when you are defining a new place to tag a photo with, you can define the area it is supposed to cover by adjusting the size of a circle around the placemark. No more pins named “Canada”, yay!
Another cool feature, hinted at in this screenshot: Smart albums for photos based on your current field of view. My new regret: Apple’s pro Aperture photo app doesn’t have all these geotools. I wish iPhoto ’09 were usable as a browsing interface for my existing Aperture photo collections. Perhaps it is?
- iFool ’09: Nooooo. iMovie ’09‘s animated travel maps don’t get you from A to B via great circle routes, but pretend the Earth is flat. Fail, Apple. At least let great circle routes be an option.
- Google Earth Enterprise goes portable: The Official Google Enterprise Blog has the announcement, and All Points Blog has the clarifications about Google Earth Enterprise Portable: Yes, disaster relief and humanitarian organizations can now take all or some of their globe data into the field, stored on an external USB disk and served from the laptop itself. No, it doesn’t mean you can take Google Earth’s base imagery with you into the field; you need to already have your own datasets on a Google Earth Enterprise system.
- Edge Question: It’s that time of the year where Edge asks science luminaries one questions. This year: “What will change everything?” Garrett Lisi predicts, among other things, that in the future “Every physical location will be geo-tagged with an overlay of information.”
- Second Earth 2.0: NOAA’s Eric Hackathorn builds an ever-better virtual virtual globe, in Second Life:
- Astronomical Object finder: Star Finder is simple yet clever. Search for an object (seriously, any object), get the view in Google Sky (web). For example, searching for UGC7777 produces a lovely colliding galaxy system. I only wish we’d get a quick KML link to the view in the standalone Google Sky.
