For this week’s FreewareFrenzy, I will be taking a look at EarthView v3.5.3. This highly customizable, screensaver and wallpaper software allows you to explore the globe with beautifully rendered maps.
The setup is quick and painless, asking you only to agree to the license and set up installation folder(s) with options for multiple users. You can choose to install EarthView for a selected user or all users, as well as the location of individual user folders. Lastly it creates a desktop shortcut and you’re all set.
When you start up for the first time, EarthView will need a few minutes to load and extract maps, and then set the map as your wallpaper. While EarthView allows you to set up both wallpaper and a screensaver, I will take a look at the Wallpaper aspect first.
The first feature that caught my eye was EarthView’s support for multi-monitors with a check of a box. When I first loaded the program, the earth map was cloned on both of my LCDs, but after enabling multi-monitor support, I could stretch the full world map across the screens for a large map view. EarthView supports any number of resolutions, including my 2560×1024. The map included with the program, as well as those available for download are limited to a 10km scale, meaning one pixel corresponds to 10km of land area. Purchasing the program allows you to download 5km and 2.7km detail maps. Keeping in mind the 10km restriction, any user can download three additional maps depending on taste. The “Photographic” map that comes with EarthView is both realistic and slightly enhanced. The Realistic map has no visual enhancements. The Artistic map has a slightly painted appearance, but is still accurate. Lastly, the Scientific map displays the distributions of land, sea and green areas of the world. Each additional map is a 2MB download.
Cloud cover on the maps is synthetic for free version users. Paid versions allow the user to use actual cloud data compiled from multiple orbiting satellite photos for an ultra realistic look at the current world picture.
Within the programs myriad of options, you’ll find that screen size can be edited with a stretchable image, just like resizing a window on your desktop. Full size is enabled by default but if you prefer a small map on an already busy background, you can squeeze it down to a tiny box. You can also set a randomize option, but this would make more sense for screensavers, as a changing desktop background could be distracting.
The “Map Area” lets you zoom into a specific area of your choice. You can zoom in up to 500%, but too high and you won’t see anything more then a brown or blue area. Interestingly I found that a 60% zoom looked the best on my monitors. Without the zoom, the edges of the world map would not display correctly, because Australia would show up on both outside edges of my monitors. Along with the zoom, you can choose a point for the center of the map. By default, a spot in the Sahara desert of Africa will “center” the map. But you can choose any point you like, even by specific latitude and longitude.
The View Options let you customize your map to show Day, Night, Cities, Clouds, Background (if your map is not full screen), and Smoothing (Anti-aliasing to remove jagged edges). Within Cities, you can tag most major cities from around the globe to show location and local time. Showing various world cities and the night shadow could be very helpful for anyone doing international work. Viewpoints can be set from a point in the Map Area, from the Sun, or a camera path (customize your own, or use a preset, such as Around the World in 80minutes).
Lastly, you can choose to project either the flat world map or the globe. On my system, I preferred the map as wallpaper, and the globe as screensaver. Under the screensaver tab, you’ll find all of the above options listed, to fully customize that aspect of the program. You can also save presets, if you find multiple setups that work for you.
General options include starting with Windows, using a tray icon, and a login for realistic clouds. The Help file offers thorough explanations of all the options available in EarthView. The program is really all about customization, for someone who wants a more practical desktop background. While it helps to have a powerful PC to handle the graphics and frequent refreshes, I found that EarthView used about 5MB of system ram and no CPU cycles to idle between refreshes.
Check out EarthView at http://www.desksoft.com/EarthView.htm The download is only 3.5MB.
