It’s the start of Winter in the Northern Hemisphere, Summer if you’re of the negative latitude persuasion. Image rendered using Catfood Earth.
I’ve just released a small patch for Catfood Earth. The patch fixes a crash on the trial expired window that has affected a number of people running the free trial. It also improves the algorithm used to detect corrupt cloud downloads. This is a very small update, but I’d recommend upgrading if you have the clouds layer enabled.
It’s the start of Summer in the Northern Hemisphere, Winter if you’re south of the Equator. The image below was rendered in Catfood Earth.
Catfood Earth 3.10 is now available for download. Thanks to everyone who took part in the beta.
Earth 3.10 is a free upgrade for existing Earth (or Desktate) customers. If you haven’t tried Earth yet 3.10 now includes a longer 30 day trial.
New features and bug fixes:
- You can now rotate the image so that a specific time or longitude is at the center of the screen. If you choose a time then the Earth map will move slowly across the screen. For a longitude the map remains fixed and the terminator between day and night moves.
- A screensaver is now included that displays the current desktop image.
- A new layer shows volcanoes that have new activity in the past week. The layer uses data from the Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program.
- You can set a custom size and layout for the desktop image. This is designed for using Earth on a monitor in landscape format to prevent the image from being distorted.
- The time zones layer has been updated with the latest tz data, shows time zones in Greenland and draws the International Date Line.
- Text rendering has been improved so that descriptions (i.e. places, earthquakes, volcanoes) do not overlap between layers. This reduces clutter if you choose to have many layers enabled.
- Earthquakes can now optionally be rendered largest first instead of most recent first. This improves clarity when a large number of quakes are displayed in close proximity.
- The cloud layer does a better job of detecting corrupt downloads. If a corrupt image is found the update is skipped. This is a big improvement as bad downloads in previous versions caused a glitchy display for several hours until the next update.
- Proxy servers are now supported.
- A bug in the time zones layer has been fixed that could cause either a crash or a failure to render any time zones.
- An occasional crash saving settings has been fixed.
- The option to not run Earth at system startup has been fixed. The option had no effect in 3.00.
(Updated 2011-06-11: Catfood Earth 3.10 is now released. Thanks to everyone who took part in the 3.10 beta.)
I’m working on an update to Catfood Earth that will include many commonly requested features such as rotating the image to a specific longitude (something that didn’t make it over from the original Catfood Desktate) and handling corrupt cloud layer downloads better.
The beta already adds support for proxy servers, allows the cloud layer download URL to be overridden, updates the time zones layer with the latest data and fixes a few different crashes and other bugs.
If you provide feedback during the beta in the form of a comment on this blog post I’ll give you a free license for Catfood Earth. If you have a license for Catfood Earth already you can give the free one to a friend. Feedback can be positive or negative and can be about your experience with the beta or a request for Catfood Earth to do something new. All you need to do is comment below. Make sure you use an email address where I can contact you (this is not made public or included in the comment, I just need a way to get in touch to provide you with your free license). This offer will expire when Catfood Earth 3.10 is released.
With this update I’ve also hooked the Catfood bug tracking system up to twitter. Follow @CatfoodSoftware to see what’s in 3.10 and to get notified as new releases of the beta become available. You can also bookmark this post and check back, I’ll note each new release below.
I hope you enjoy the beta and I’m looking forwards to lots of great feedback!
(Updated 2011-05-28: Version 3.10.0165. Includes a screen saver that shows the current Catfood Earth image and adds support for rotating the image so that a specific longitude or solar (sidereal) time is at the center of the screen.)
(Updated 2011-06-05: Version 3.10.0222. Support for custom image size and location (i.e. for display on a monitor with portrait orientation), corrupt cloud downloads detected and skipped, option to display larger earthqukes first instead of most recent first, international date line shown on timezones layer, improved text wrapping and prevents text overlap between layers.)
(Updated 2011-06-07: Version 3.10.0236. Added volcanoes layer.)
It’s the start of Spring today in the northern hemisphere, Autumn if you’re south of the equator:
Rendered in Catfood Earth.
It’s the start of winter in the northern hemisphere, summer if you live south of the Equator. The image of the solstice below was rendered in Catfood Earth:
The video below shows earthquakes of magnitude 2.5 or higher from November, 2010. Each quake fades over the course of a day (which lasts two seconds in the video).
I created this using Catfood Earth, saving an image every hour for the month of November. There is some minor flickering from frames with no data. It's amazing to watch how active the Earth really is. On my desktop I have the earthquakes layer set to magnitude 5.0+ so I only see larger quakes. When a really big quake happens I often see it on my desktop before it hits the news.
Summer ends and autumn begins in the northern hemisphere. South of the equator it’s the start of spring. The picture of the equinox below was rendered in Catfood Earth.
