Google Earth

Google Earth 4.3 came out this week… it has some nice eye candy that provides for a fun distraction.  This includes textured 3D buildings in some cities, adjustable sunlight (without all the waiting you have to do in real life!).  The new zooming interface is more spiderman-like, which I like, though it took a bit of time to figure out how to use.

(link)

The sunlight stuff is pretty cool when you are looking at natural scenes. Here’s a screenshot I took of Mount St. Helens at dawn:
(click for full size)

The 3D cities with textures look awesome, and they’re a lot of fun to explore if you have a good enough computer and connection. Here are a couple of screenshots I took of San Francisco and Boston:

Suddenly I have an urge to play SimCity…

Google’s LatLong blog has more info and screenshots of 3D buildings as well as some tips for navigating the 3D environment (like spiderman, of course).