Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative

Posted by luoc 9 hours ago

Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative(apps.metaebene.me)

209 points | 54 comments

andai 5 hours ago|

> Kugelblitz shows the Earth and its neighbors as a globe and as an atlas you fly over smoothly like a pilot, even on an M1.

Even on M1? Didn't Google Earth run smoothly when it came out? (Which was apparently 25 years ago, oh my goodness!)

Nekorosu 5 hours ago||

I was going to highlight the same thing. M1 is very powerful and this kind of application would be more limited by the amount of unified RAM. If it works well on 8Gb it's a good one. Mentioning M1 like this actually makes the app look bad.

kiwibyproxy 5 hours ago|||

did you check out the page? this features a "flying mode" in 3D terrain, streamable to Vision Pro

flohofwoe 5 hours ago|||

It's still doing nothing that a 20 year old flight simulator wouldn't be able to do. The one potential performance problem on a laptop with HighDPI display might be the pixel fillrate to render at full resolution, but the pixel shaders in Google Earth should be extremely cheap, and if that's not enough it could drop down to half resolution with 4x MSAA without much quality loss (but an M1 GPU easily has enough oompfh per pixel on a Retina display for what Google Earth needs to render).

echoangle 4 hours ago|||

FSX from 2006 had 3D terrain you could fly over and streaming to a VR headset isn’t that hard either. An oculus Quest has effectively mobile phone power and can run VR games on device.

someguyiguess 4 hours ago||

Yeah in 480p

VMG 4 hours ago|||

There is a Netflix miniseries about how two German underdog hackers built the first Google Earth precursor in 1994(!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Billion_Dollar_Code

(IIRC the premise was that the underdogs invented something like mipmaps, which I found hard to believe. The core tech was probably already invented by 3d shooters at that time)

LukaD 2 hours ago||

It's not the same mipmapping that games use really, but dividing the map data into a quadtree with progressively finer resolutions.

It's more like turning mipmapping into a paging system.

jandrewrogers 49 minutes ago|||

In the earliest days it required expensive GPUs to run well.

walrus01 5 hours ago|||

There's a ton of single threaded performance problems in Google Earth Pro if you watch its activity closely, when you have something like 150MB-300MB of KML placemark lat/long locations and lines loaded. Moving to a new geographic area will cause it to re-read the entire KML for an area and render the placemarks/lines onto the map using *only one CPU core* no matter the capability of your system. There's tons of other things it does with only one core.

Load the fiber maps for a facilities based ISP that spans a few county size up to a whole state size of scale, with good granular detail (like splice case and pedestal locations, etc) and watch Google Earth Pro slow to an absolute crawl even on a $599 current gen Intel core-whatever or AMD Ryzen single socket workstation CPU.

To be fair to it, people are trying to do all kinds of things these days with KML files that it really wasn't designed for, or ever intended for, and are much better done with professional grade GIS software.

tomaskafka 5 hours ago||

For agents, M1s are the ancient machines, made long before they were born, and, the horror, barely enough to provide enough nutrients to even a small LLM.

richardstahl 4 hours ago||

Kudos to Tim for creating this! In the last Freakshow Podcast he gave a walkthrough of how he created it.

https://freakshow.fm/fs313-der-tripelpunkt-der-metaebene

As other commenters said: TerraVision vibes.

rob74 8 hours ago||

In case you're wondering, "Kugelblitz" is German for "ball lightning" (literally "spherical lightning")- probably refers to showing the "sphere" (the Earth) as fast as lightning?

marcelox86 1 hour ago||

this kind of app would really benefit from having NSScrollEdgeEffectStyle set to .soft. the huge toolbars (which tbf, is the fault of Liquid Glass, not the developer) and their opaque background takes away a lot of space that could be a peripheral for the map with NSScrollEdgeEffectStyle.

also, the Hide Toolbar option hides the traffic lights too...? this isn't standard macOS behavior...

motoroco 1 hour ago||

what data sources are you using for the global satellite imagery? I’m building mosaics for my own app but don’t have the pockets to pay for licensed data right now. NAIP is fantastic for the US but I’d really like to get z16+ coverage for Europe, too

Drake_Rubicon 1 hour ago|

The app only uses public available sources. Have a look at the library section for a overview or the current used data sources:

https://apps.metaebene.me/en/kugelblitz/features/library

sebslomski 7 hours ago||

Terravision

jttnr 7 hours ago|

Context: Kugelblitz is by one of the guys who made the original Terravision, which Google copied to make Google Earth.

Sadly, Kugelblitz is only available for Mac and is closed-source for now. And, of course, it's vibe-coded. He talks a little bit about his reasoning on his podcast (in German): https://logbuch-netzpolitik.de/lnp563-des-kaisers-neue-kleid...

a3w 6 hours ago|||

One out of two guys. Also, I listened to his podcasts for ten years, and he always had high standards. But 1. this gets really annoying, fast 2. Right now, he talks about a lot of stuff he does not know about as if he would know everything in the world.

Really can't stand him any more.

And yes, project is not even F/LOSS. 3D mouse recommended, this guy is aloft from the rest of human civilization.

jttnr 5 hours ago|||

I partially agree. There was a time when Tim was hardly bearable, especially toward the end of CRE, but in my opinion, things have improved in recent years.

avhception 4 hours ago||

Was there an official "end" of CRE? I was still hoping for new episodes some day.

jttnr 3 hours ago||

Not sure, there is no indication on the website. Maybe its just an extra long pause.

unkeen 6 hours ago|||

Exactly my thoughts. In the end, he's just a pretty regular guy who exchanged his once high standards for the "enabling" factor of AI, striving for mediocrity now. Really sad and disappointing.

rented_mule 5 hours ago|||

Are you saying Keyhole copied Terravision when they created EarthViewer? Google Earth was a rebranding, with continued development, of Keyhole EarthViewer after Google bought Keyhole.

manol74 5 hours ago||

Terravision started much earlier than Keyhole, however the lawsuit agains Google wasn't successful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terravision#History

There is also a Netflix Mini-series inspired by the case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Billion_Dollar_Code

carlos-cute 8 hours ago||

Great ! I tried it on my apple M1Pro and it works fine :) I would not put the grid at first lunching and I'd like that the earth keep spinning a bit when throwing it with the mouse !

dr_dshiv 7 hours ago||

Cool! Want to add clouds? Here are some ideas to try!

Https://Earthlove.live

KaiserPro 7 hours ago||

does it have all the tooling that the original google earth had, or is it more like apple maps?

ilumanty 8 hours ago|

> Kugelblitz shows the Earth and its neighbors as a globe and as an atlas you fly over smoothly like a pilot, even on an M1

As if Google Earth wasn’t smooth on a 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 in 2009

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