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.