The day has finally come for anyone who
ever wanted the world at his/her fingertips; the Earth is on the iPhone, Google
style and oddly enough, it feels like a natural progression for the veritable
globe-trotting application. Since its launch back in 2006 Google Earth had an
interface that just begged to be touched. I mean, spinning the globe with the
cursor hand was good fun and all, but I always wanted to reach out and give it
a spin with my own peter-pointer, you know? Well now I can and it’s damn fun.
The Google Earth app is available for free
through the iTunes app store and it clocks in at 8MB. It fires up in similar fashion
to the desktop version and once complete it’ll spin about. The controls are
bang on intuitive and feel quite natural. You can rotate the globe by placing a
finger on either side and turning clockwise or counter-clockwise. Pinch-zooming
is at your disposal as well and double-tapping an area on the map zooms in. The
whole control scheme hearkens back to when you first got to play with the
iPhone or Touch; the titillation of manipulating things on screen with your
fingers is reborn when you’re looking at your hometown and pinch-zooming your
house into view.
This news was actually brought to my
attention by an article on the New York Times website, in which they break down
what they liked about the app, and what they didn’t. One gripe was the
tilt-sensor functionality. Supposedly this option works but for me it
constantly switched between portrait and landscape modes whenever I tilted the
device. At times I managed to direct the world via tilting but it was
infrequent and not all that useful. That being said, the NYT article had no
such issues, but just bemoaned losing the desired focus when handing the iPhone
off to a co-worker. However, if that’s your only issue, then simply turn off
the tilt-sensor in the Google Earth settings. NYT also noted the lack of layers
in the app, including street names. And while the admitted it was likely do to
the capabilities of the phone itself, it’d nevertheless have been a nice
feature.
But with those drawbacks aside, they
concluded that it was fantastic app, great for practical applications or just
killing time. And I have to agree, especially at that price.
