I’ve been waiting for a sign that things would get better. After the wonderful way Google Earth grew in the first 8 years or so after it was launched, and the fantastic support Google gave to its huge growing fan base, it was disheartening to watch how this next phase in development started. Eventually, my frustration grew to a point that this blog was essentially stopped after 12 years of almost daily posts. And, the reality is that after waiting about 5 years for new Google Earth capabilities, the new version was a disappointment to its fans. I suggested to them they should give it more prominence, but that didn’t really happen. But, in Google’s attempt to highlight their “accomplishments” with the first release, they downplayed the value of the more powerful and useful version for the desktop on their home page with a single link (still true today) that said “Older version” (they changed that finally to say “Earth Pro for Desktop”). In the meantime, Google assured us they would continue to support the desktop version, and they have indeed (as mentioned here).įor a while after the event, I attempted to calm down the reactions from long-time fans. I was assured by Google that a lot of effort was going in to incorporate missing power features for the fans of Google Earth. The focus for the first release was to get basic browsing, and to support the new “Voyager” exploration tools to allow more web-like dynamic content to overlay the geographic content to tell “stories”.

The bad news, for a lot of veteran fans of Google Earth on the desktop, was that most of the tools most valued (measuring tools, content creation tools, GPS support, and much more), and a great deal of support for Google Earth content, was missing in the first release of the new platform.

The good news is that the application ran surprisingly well in Chrome and on Android (as mentioned in my review). A complete re-write of the underlying application which finally unified the Google Maps (more current) mapping data with a formerly independent (and aging not-updated) dataset used by Google Earth on the desktop for years. A year ago, Google held a fancy venue in a New York museum to announce the next grand release of Google Earth.

Google earth pro desktop version