Within the first few days of the new release of GE 4 beta, several of the most popular applications for creating KML content released support for the new time animation feature. The feature is simple to add to KML (see docs), so expect everyone to support this feature if they keep their apps up to date. NOTE: you must have the latest version of GE 4 beta to see time animations. Here’s a summary of applications supporting time:
- GPSVisualizer – An excellent collection of data visualization tools specializing in GPS data. I wrote about his time support on Friday. See the ski trip example
I did. See previous GEB write-ups.
- Magnalox – Another powerful suite of tools for visualizing GPS data with the most interactive output options. Now supports time feature as well. Here’s an example . See previous GEB write-ups.
- Arc2Earth – Brian Flood wrote an excellent summary of the new GE 4 time feature and includes some examples – toxic waste sites , and the US states as they were adopted over time. Brian and I exchanged E-mails as he was creating a new time animation of hurricanes tracks (2000-2006). This one is really cool. Arc2Earth allows you to take ESRI ArcGIS data and output it in a variety of ways to GE. See previous GEB writeups.
- KMLer 1.4 – Another excellent application for taking ArcGIS data and visualizing in GE, KMLer 1.4 was released on Thursday with time stamp support. See previous GEB writeups.
- GPSBabel – this open source GPS conversion tool supports GE time stamps as of version 1.3.1. via OgleEarth.
About Frank Taylor
Frank Taylor started the Google Earth Blog in July, 2005 shortly after Google Earth was first released. He has worked with 3D computer graphics and VR for many years and was very impressed with this exciting product. Frank completed a 5.5 year circumnavigation of the earth by sailboat in June 2015 which you can read about at Tahina Expedition, and is a licensed pilot, backpacker, diver, and photographer.