Google Sightseeing takes you on tour of the world as seen from satellite, using the free Google Earth program, or Google Maps in your web browser. Each weekday your guides James and Alex present new weird and wonderful sights as suggested by readers.
Yesterday Google released an updated version of Google Earth for PC, Mac or Linux.
Google Earth blog has posted a video highlighting some of the new features, which include:
This form will auto-link URLs or you can use simple HTML, <a href="http://googlesightseeing.com">Like this</a>.
Link to specific places either as a Google Maps page or a decimal latitude and longitude written like this: lat/lng:55.949400,-3.200000.
If you've found an unrelated sight that you think should be posted in its own entry then use the suggestion form!
The weirdest and best of Google Earth is now available in the…
Cool! Thanks for the b-day prezzie, Google!
Wowie! Nice one!
The Street View integration isn’t as slick as I had hoped.
I’ve been looking at the shadow effect thing over Edinburgh (Arthur’s Seat), and it’s not very good.
Ok, I’ve been converted back to Earth compared to Maps I think…
The new version sucks!! It I was using Ver Google Earth 4.2.0180.1134
and had no problems but the new ver breaks my directx and won’t work.
Also the older versions had a stand alone install but now you must install a “updater” that checks for new versions all the time and tries to install features that you may not want. Just one more piece of bloatware to work around. Why oh why Google did you have to screw up a beautiful product.
I’m not a fan of the revised tilt controls… I have yet to figure out how to with onloy a sinlge or double click reset the tilt to overhead view. You can still reset the compass to North with a double click.
I aint too keen on the new controls either.
Very fiddly and not as intuitive as before.
I believe that the guys at Google,upon hearing my concerns, are frantically working on rectifying it! :I
The new version of G’Earth sucks. I do not like it. The controls on the last version were very intuitive but hell if I can figure this one out. Google you struck out with this one.I believe this version should be call Google Earth “Vista”.
Well this release is apparently a “beta” so I guess these issues may get fixed before a final release! Consider yourselves Google branded guinea pigs.
Since the keyboard nav of the new version is about as inconvenient as “virtual Earth” I may as well just use the microsoft product now. btw, it is more accurate, too, finding addresses. Anyhow, it is very infrequent, but the google team has really let me down with the newest version of Earth.
Meh- I love the 3d buildings, it’s amazing how many they’ve managed to produce now, and surprisingly detailed. But the worse navigation (even with the wacky auto-tilt turned off), awkward zoom, and in places really horrible fonts, were enough to make me go back to the previous version.
Google will have to fix the navagation on this one they really messed it up bad i love google earth but version 4.3 sucks big C#%& and i dont even mess with it now oh and who cares about the sun and why is the earth all blue oh i know why its got blue balls from the lame navagation controls.
The keyboard navigation is downright awful in 4.3. Why not just a simple option to allow the zoom capability that 4.2 had? Now they want us to move our fingers to the pgUp and pgDown just to zoom? I want to be able to do everything without moving my hands around the keyboard. Completely unusable on a laptop. Sad because other features of 4.3 are good.
So I’m running the new Google Earth on Vista x64. The new controls are a bit quirky, and I’m not sure I really care for them, but the controls aren’t my problem. My problem is that all of the images now look like poorly compressed low res jpg’s. I live near Pittsburgh, PA and one of my favorite places to look around is downtown Pittsburgh. I can be at an eye altitude of around 5400 feet and all of the images would look crisp. Now they just look plain horrible.
I thought I’d uninstall the new version and go back one for which I have an installer, and wouldn’t you know, the images still look like crap. Now if I use Google Earth at work, the images are as crisp as they should be, even in the latest version, but as soon as I use it on Vista, the images look bad.
What could my issues be? Why would Vista be rendering images in Google Earth than XP would? Is it a DirectX issue? I would say that it isn’t a DX issue because the images look equally as bad in OpenGL.
its realy cool
i havent got it
i have it now tar google
Well at least everyone here has been able to use it. Whenever I try to open google earth it says file location error…and click to send info. that’s it…
I used to refer to google for locations all around the globe…now I am not able to even oped it at all.
Please Google…you’ve got to do better than this???
JP, did you ever figure out why Google doesn’t seem to “focus” until you zoom in really close? We are running XP Professional SP2 at work and it does exactly what you describe in your post. I am afraid to upgrade to the new Google at home for fear of the same issue. I have searched all over and cannot figure out how to get it to focus at higher eye elevations. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Tilting used to be fun. Not so much any more if 4.3 beta continues in its current form. In 4.2, tilting essentially kept a locality in view by tilting the earth’s surface, thus letting me compare angles and choose my favorite angle for viewing the topography of a particular area. In 4.3, tilting aims its central point more and more toward the horizon and away from my intended locality, showing me places of less interest and forcing me to drag backward to relocate whatever I was examining. In other words 4.2 tilted the land (with the axis being a horizontal line midway down the window) but 4.3 tilts the camera (with the axis being a horizontal line through the camera). I think GE developers are trying to achieve a more realistic view - after all, earth cannot really be tilted, and a camera can be. But Google Earth 4.2 and prior was better than life-like! Tilting the earth was awesome and can only be approximated in life by riding a 10-mile-or-so escalator down, in which one starts at its top by looking straight down and rides down and eventually looking straight outward, while keeping an area of interest centered in the view. I will miss this perspective very much.
I want to add my vote against the new navigation controls. I don’t care one way or the other about the onscreen controls, since I rarely use them, but the ability to fully re-orient, translate, and zoom the point of view entirely with the arrow keys and a couple of modifiers was the best feature of Google Earth. I will be declining to update my copy of Google Earth until I confirm that either the old keyboard controls or a reasonable facsimile thereof is added. Honestly.. I might as well stick with Google Maps if the keyboard support stays this broken.
I blogged a bit on the attitude that “the new way is an improvement” in the face of a sea of complaints:
http://positivelyatlantaga.com/2008/07/16/we-shall-simply-explain/
@ jcburns - thanks for that info from GE I didn’t know about the “shift key” thing. However, it still won’t allow you to reset the tilt by double clicking. And you’re right about one handing the mouse.
The tilt in 4.3 is truly awful. Please restore the old tilt slide bar.
WHERE IS THE TILT CONTROL???
@ BO VAN DEN ASSUM…see that thing in the Top right corner with the eye? ….well click there and move around, if you click just above the eye it will tilt the view, click below the eye and it tilts back to overhead view.
You can also tilt by pressing and holding the “Ctrl” key while clicking the globe and moving the mouse to tilt up and down.
New Google Earth 4.3 won’t launch on my PC, this stinks. Old version 4.2 worked great!
I’m another unhappay Google Earth 4.3 person after download. This program will not open and I can’t revert back to 4.2.0205 that worked just fine on our 8200 Dell Pentium 4. I’ve tried numerous time to uninstall and reinstall 4.2(that work before), but still nothing. Do you have a fix? I’m running XP SP3,2.4 Gh Penium, 64mb Nvidia 4200 ti, 768 mb of Ram and has never been a problem until I was asked to update to 4.3 Google Earth.
This new google earth really sucks. I used to double click and it would zoom in a little, if i wanted more i would scroll. now it zooms in a lot, twists and turns at the same time for no apperant reason. when I try to look at the landscape it completly removes what I was looking at and views a whole new teratory. WTF guys. Did you fire all your engineers and hire a bunch of high school kids from china cause they are cheeper? not a whole lot makes sence with the new program. I cant even use it without wanting to punch my keyboard. worthless, I will wait till next year for the revised old version that worked. See you then or wait for a better company to make something that works.
Another unhappy upgrader here. Ditto what Malcolm said about tilting - I don’t want to tilt the camera, I want to tilt the earth. GE 4.3 is also slower, the images don’t “clean up” as nicely, and it crashes. Google Earth used to be fun to play with, but now it’s just frustrating. I would use it to plot hiking trips in the mountains, but it’s just too cumbersome to do that now.
Just wanted to add to the previous comments about how completely and utterly rubbish the new zoom and tilt controls are. They are truely truely bad, and simply unusable. The old ones were nice simple and very easy to use and did exactly what you expected, unlike the new ones that do random stuff and move you away from what you are trying to look at. These new ones make you want to chuck your machine out the window with frustration. Come on Google, please please give us back the old ones ASAP - they worked and everybody liked them. Can’t find any complaints about how they used to work, just lots and lots about the new style - come on listen to the people for once !!
HEEEELLLPP!!
How can I revert to the previous edition of Google Earth $.2 I think. The new edition 4.3.7284.3916 (beta) is a disaster, it’s slow and the controls are awful to use requiring constant fiddling to zoom in without tilting..
My previous version worked perfectly.
Spike Jones.
new google earth mail ? thanks
Folks
Problem solved
http://www.oldapps.com/Google_Earth.php
I downloaded version 4.0.2737 and it works a treat. I uninstalled the latest version before re-installing the old version, but happily my “places” were not deleted.
Google Earth is once again useful.
Enjoy
Thanks for that link Bob. The controls in 4.3 are horrific. They must’ve let the Lively team work on the new version. Horrific decision making.