Applications

The Google Earth Satellite Tracker

April 3, 2013

Since the creation of this blog in 2005, our page featuring satellites in orbit around Earth has remained our most popular page on the site with over 650,000 page views in the past eight years.
There have also been a number of other excellent satellite-tracking programs that we’ve featured on here, such as SES Astra and SightSpaceStation.
Now we’re introducing you to the GE Satellite Tracker from Joseph Armbruster, which is a bit different; instead of showing you various satellites in Google Earth, it allows you to add your own.

It allows you to calculate the orbits, generate the KML and configure it via single python file and one configuration file. Joseph is continually improving and streamlining the program, which is completely free to use.
You can try it for yourself and read the full documentation on the GE Satellite Tracker site.

Meograph adds paid licenses

March 28, 2013

We’ve been big fans of Meograph since we first discovered it last May. Their “four-dimensional storytelling” makes it very easy to create digital stories that include audio, video, images, text and map them all as the story progresses.
Since their launch last year, they’ve added more than 26,000 users to the site who have created over 36,000 meographs. Even more impressive is that it has been used in over 1,300 schools and is growing by 30 percent each month!

To help generate some revenue from the growing service, Meograph is now launching some paid plans for educators, starting at $19.99/year. The plans include features such as ad removal, private sharing, class management and a few other items. Of note is that the free plans remain intact for everyone, whether they’re in an educational environment or not.

All in all, it seems to be a nice way to handle the move to paid licenses. The free product remains available and feature-rich, but there are now some nice add-ons for those that use the product heavily in their classroom.
Congrats to founder Misha Leybovich on the continued success of Meograph! Try it out for yourself at Meograph.com, or learn more about these new educational features in this article on TechCrunch.

New iOS app to view the SES Astra satellite info

February 4, 2013

Last year we showed you the excellent satellite info from the folks at SES Astra. They created a great map that showed the locations and details of their 50 satellites.
Now they’ve released an iPad app with the same data, and it’s very well presented.

Here is a brief video that shows how it works:

For now it is only available on iPad, though they’re considering creating an Android version of it at some point in the future.
It’s a very well-done app, and you can get it here in the app store, or read more about it on the SES website.

Cycling the Alps releases Android App

January 8, 2013

A little more than two years ago we introduced you to the excellent Cycling the Alps website. They feature hundreds of Google Earth tours of various cycing routes in the Alps, and they’ve added many new features since then.
After reading our article about how great Google Earth looks on the Nexus 10, they decided to create an Android app for it. They built it using the Android Maps v2 API and the result is quite impressive!

The app is free and can be found here in the Google Play store. It’s compatible with most Android devices, so head out there and give it a shot.

View all of your Google Contacts in Google Earth

October 29, 2012

Here’s a neat script from digital inspiration that can grab your contact list from Google Contacts and covert them into a big KML file to view in Google Earth. If you use Google for your main contact management (synced to your phone, etc), then this script could yield some pretty neat results for you.

It’s really a pretty simple process. Copy their special spreadsheet into your Google Drive account, then the follow the included instructions. While there are seemingly no issues in loading this spreadsheet and granting it access to your account, certainly be careful when granting scripts that kind of access.
You can also view the resulting map in Google Maps. Take the KML file, upload it somewhere (including your Dropbox folder, for example) and then just copy the link into Google Maps.

(via Lifehacker)