Cool Mac Gear

I really love Gary C. Martin’s MoonDock, an OS X application that is designed to display up-to-date images of the Moon phase in your MacOS X Dock and can be configured to display a floating Desktop Moon image of the current phase. Software for moon freaks.

Now Gary offers us EarthGlobe, a real-time, OpenGL rendered globe. Designed as a sister application to MoonDock - it provides a lightweight view of the Earth day-light/seasonal cycles and takes up few system resources so it can be left running on your Desktop too. A preview 0.9 version is available from the link below.

Features are still subject to change, but I downloaded (140k) and tried it out last evening, and it’s pretty nice already.

A particularly cool feature with EarthGlobe that does not apply to MoonDock, since the moon does not rotate, is that you can Command-drag on the globe image on your Desktop, and rotate it at will to show the daylight status of anywhere on earth.

You can also enter the longitude and latitude coordinates of any location in the EarthGlobe data window by dragging sliders, and the image will center on that position. Sun and earth information is also provided.

There is no documentation with EarthGlobe yet, but none is really needed as the program is very intuitive.

As with MoonDock, EarthGlobe has little practical utility, but a looks spectacular, takes only a minute or two to download, occupies minuscule system resources, and is very cool. Thank you Gary.

EarthGlobe and MoonDock are donationware.

For more information, visit:
http://www.geocities.com/garycmartin/osx/

Charles W. Moore