The best applications are not only the ones that come free, but either work indispensably well or have new groundbreaking features that no other software has provided. Google earth ( http://www.google.com) is an excellent example encompassing all of these qualities.
In simple terms, it is a piece of freely downloadable virtual globe, software that feature satellite, imagery, aerial photography, and a myriad of other information like the name of locations of the building, restuarants, schools and even driving directions. While this may like sound Google Maps, this killer app provides more visual details of countries outside US around the world. It also incorporates data from Google local for some of its comprehensive information on certain cities in US. You can search for businesses in US and the street addresses, along with a phone number, will pop up in a speech bubble and Google earth will fly and zoom so that the building associated with the business. You can even get driving directions to or from that location. A whole choice of layers can be turned off or on, although some of the more interesting layers like hotels and place to eat only apply to some cities in US and parts of Western Europe.
A specialized language call Keyhole Markup Language (KML), based on XML, is used in the application, containing a basic description of the place, longitude, latitiude, tilt and other information. Images are streamed accordingly on demand that ensures smooth network delivery over the internet. But not al the area of the world is covered to a high resolution level but the minimum you will get to see a geographic features and man-made development. For areas that are covered in high resolution, (most major cities in the US, Western Europe, Canada and UK), you will be able to zoom all the way down to individual buildings or a street. The paranoid might think that being able to see a building to that level of detail is an invasion of privacy. Not to worry though, as the images are not live. In fact, the oldest ones Google Earth uses for some area are up to 3 years old.
Another really neat feature is the provision of place marks contributed by the keyhole Community BBS (bbs.keyhole.com), allowing you to even examine the individual buildings or features of the Forbidden City in Shanghai, China.
Google earth is really the next best thing to actually physically traveling and we can easily imagine a handheld device running this killer app in the near future; no one will ever be lost on this earth ever.
That’s all for Google Earth
Till my next
Happy Googling
:)