History

Earth was designed, written and released in 2006. The aim was to provide a high level view of the Earth, as it would appear from outer-space, whilst providing useful Earth and time based information. This was considered useful for a trip collaboration system as you could get a better idea of which parts of your trip would be day/night. Also providing a small gadget that could always run on your computer, like a Microsoft/Google Desktop Gadget, would allow you to easily monitor trips of interest.

Early 2006 a simple web based system was written to show day/night on a 2D flat Earth, but that just looked awkward. Also, showing day/night regions on a zoomed in part of the Earth didn't seem particularly useful either when you could see the same information from a high level view. The day/night view of the Earth looks significantly better from a high level view of a round 3D Earth than a flat 2D Earth.

Consequently a Java 3D Earth was written with the aim to focus on providing a high level, nice 3D view of the Earth, which could be run inside a web page or as an application on your computer.

Unfortunately Java 3D libraries require a separate install on your computer when running applets, so the applet version of Earth was not widely available in 2006. During 2006, Earth was run as a JNLP, network launched application, since this would automatically upgrade/install the required Java and Java 3D components; making it easy for users to run.

The 2006 version of Earth had day/night views of the Earth, current global cloud, Sun shading, selectable date/time and corresponding views of the Earth, different monthly satellite Earth views, selectable timezones to view the local-time in another timezone, sun rise/set and first/last light times at the loctation pointed to by your cursor. It even had commercial aircraft locations shown, based on the current or user-selected date/time.

In 2007 Earth was enhanced to provide more precise sunrise/sunset and first/last light times by creating a precise sun shading algorithm instead of the generic sphere shading. Magnetic variation at the cursor, based on the selected date, was added. An applet version was released, based on Sun's JNLP applet launcher applet. This would automatically install the required Java 3D libraries for an applet, thus making an applet version of Earth easy for users to run. Terrain shading was added to give the Earth a more 3D look; the terrain shading is based on the selected Sun's position and changes as the Sun moves. Cloud history was added so that 24 hours of cloud could be animated on top of the Earth; animated clouds show more useful information than one static cloud image. Also, clouds were enhanced to look 3D. A lower memory version of Earth was released, which was designed to run as a small application on the desktop. Earth was also added as a Google Gadget so it could be run on an iGoogle page or from Google Desktop.

Late-2007 to early-2008. Added ability to show local-time and timezone at the current cursor location. Thus making it easy to just point to a location on the Earth and see the local-time at that location (including the daylight-savings time and sun rise/set times). This shows the time difference between the current/selected time and the location of interest. Also show country and state boundaries when mouse is over that country.