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Posted by luoc 10 hours ago

Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative(apps.metaebene.me)
209 points | 54 commentspage 2
simmschi 8 hours ago|
Ah, doesn't work on Sequoia 15.8.x. I wonder what features my Mac is missing to display a sphere with data.
elAhmo 8 hours ago||
Same, such a shame developers are going this route, e.g. Raycast 2 as well won't work on older MacOS versions. I don't plan on updating to the liquid thingy as long as I can on my laptops.
planb 6 hours ago|||
Golden Gate Sidebar Layout. Designing for Sequoia is different than for Tahoe, and even more for the pre Liquid Glass OSes. Totally sensible for a new software to only care about future releases imho.
simmschi 4 hours ago||
Yeah, sorry I didn't mean to sound salty. I was just a bit surprised, this is the first application that refuses to run on my M4 macbook. Maybe time to upgrade OSX :)
ModernTimes 7 hours ago|||
To the developer, please just add this line to your prompt: "ensure it works on the 2 previous versions of MacOS".
dkmar 8 hours ago||
macOS 27 min version lmao
flohofwoe 7 hours ago||
> Smooth, even on an M1...

Well, I would certainly excpect that an application that was already running smoothly on vanilla computers around 2005 also runs smoothly on a computer from 2020 ;)

vessenes 3 hours ago||
Can we pay $4 to have the AI only build the software and not the marketing materials?
rrr_oh_man 7 hours ago||
Is it really too much to ask to at least edit the slopscription?

  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. Imagery, road map and topographic map lie on real terrain, joined by thousands of open maps from the Library. Everything comes from freely available geodata, straight from its publishers, OpenStreetMap from the Kugelblitz tile server; you need no account.
  Everything loaded stays in the cache, and Kugelblitz instances in the same network share it with each other if you wish. Status windows tell how far the view has loaded, where you are looking and where its data comes from, and every source is listed with its license in “Sources and Licenses”. Kugelblitz speaks German and English and uses the units of your choice.
luoc 6 hours ago||
The author is heavily using AI and does not hide it. Quite the opposite, he embraces the technology and spoke quite a bit about it in one of his podcasts (German): https://freakshow.fm/fs313-der-tripelpunkt-der-metaebene?t=2...
unkeen 3 hours ago||
Doesn't make it better, does it.
sofayam 7 hours ago|||
Strange, nothing in those two paragraphs sounds particularly LLM-like to me. What am I missing?
eproxus 7 hours ago|||
I had the same reaction. Some phrases stand out to me:

- "Imagery, road map and topographic map lie on real terrain"

- "joined by thousands of open maps from the Library" (what "Library"? Why capital L?)

- "Everything loaded stays in the cache"

- "Status windows tell how far the view has loaded"

- "every source is listed with its license in 'Sources and Licenses'"

Many cases of inanimate subjects with animate verbs "Imagery [...] lie", "windows tell". Also, some of it feels redundant and doesn't feel written in a way a human would, e.g. "every source is listed with its license in 'Sources and Licenses'".

Also, things like "the cache" feels like it is obvious for the LLM since it probably has that in the context a lot, but for a user, what does "the cache" mean? For a user facing description I would have expected either "a cache" or another formulation like "Everything downloaded by Kugelblitz is stored in a local cache" or something along those lines.

coldtea 6 hours ago|||
"you fly over smoothly like a pilot" (so, with my view limited by the cockpit, and constrained to mandatory airways?)

"Everything comes from freely available geodata, straight from its publishers" (as opposed to using "freely available geodata" through mediators?)

"joined by thousands of open maps from the Library" (what Library? Of Congress?)

"Kugelblitz instances in the same network share it with each other if you wish" (yeah "if you wish" sure is how a human would phrase an optional setting)

"Kugelblitz speaks German and English and uses the units of your choice" (same)

and many more

It's slop writing.

paulhilbert 6 hours ago|||
No, it's not. It sounds exactly like Tim Pritlove when he speaks German. Not everyone is a native speaker, you know?

In one of his recent podcasts he explained that he wanted to create a mixture of Google Earth and a libray. So "Library" is specifically meant as a name for the mixed data source aggregation.

To be clear: The entire software is vibecoded in a language Pritlove doesn't even have worked with prior to that. But when it comes to talking about his ideas Pritlove surely does not need a LLM. This guy basically started the German podcast scene and has been talking about software for at least 30 years.

coldtea 5 hours ago||
>No, it's not. It sounds exactly like Tim Pritlove when he speaks German

Germans are still LLM, just in human form.

morsch 4 hours ago|||
> as opposed to using "freely available geodata" through mediators?

I think that's the idea, yes. Usually the mediator is the publisher of the software who at least maintains a proxy, but often recombobulates the data in a way that makes for sense for their software. This is also doesn't leave the original publisher paying for the software user's traffic. Probably not much an issue for a first release.

nomnomno 6 hours ago||
That's so typically German/Austrian... Someone has built some great software, something that would have been unthinkable just a few month ago. And you guys are whining that the website could still use some cosmetic improvements... Release your own software and make it better. But if you just spout bullshit on LinkedIn, nothing's going to happen.
ilumanty 3 hours ago||||
Nobody hates Germans more than Germans
a3w 3 hours ago||||
He is working on this since at least 1993, as in: longer than Duke Nukem Forever.

And whenever HE talks about Software, his feedback is even much worse. Since this is about the piece of software, not the person, we should criticise at will.

As for the person: he usually claims other peope lack his standards in crafting good products with an intelligent choice of ... ? object oriented language X/Y/Z, whatever buzzword he claims is best. Coders gonna code the way they like, but he loudly claims his way if superior since it makes less mistakes. As we all strive, unless we embace the Cuck Coding and/or that perfect is the enemy of good.

Oh, the irony in defending even that guy against clones of himself.

frnz 5 hours ago|||
and, and! It's Mac OS 27 only! I mean, really?

Edit: I can't switch since I need some older intel apps...

mikojan 4 hours ago||
Please just fix Apple Maps
jameshart 1 hour ago|
Apple Maps is pretty impressive these days. Did you file a bug report for your specific problem?
walrus01 8 hours ago||
With the upcoming retirement of google earth (desktop), I'd also recommend looking into geolibre for this sort of thing. No it doesn't come by default with a nice full color photo mapped onto 3D terrain as google earth does, but for less technical users or those with less complex demands, it has a much lower learning curve/complexity than giving people a full QGIS setup with a bunch of back-end db connected.

https://geolibre.app/

bbaid 7 hours ago|
Some features of KML and KMZ don't work on Geolibre, while working on Kugelblitz surprisingly!
damwwoo 2 hours ago||
[flagged]
zhangrenhui 10 hours ago|
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