Sad Lack of Visible Progress on Google Earth for Chrome and Mobile One Year Later — gearthblog.com

A year ago, Google held a fancy venue in a New York museum to announce the next grand release of Google Earth. A complete re-write of the underlying application which finally unified the Google Maps (more current) mapping data with a formerly independent (and aging not-updated) dataset used by Google Earth on the desktop for years. The good news is that the application ran surprisingly well in Chrome and on Android (as mentioned in my review). The bad news, for a lot of veteran fans of Google Earth on the desktop, was that most of the tools most valued (measuring tools, content creation tools, GPS support, and much more), and a great deal of support for Google Earth content, was missing in the first release of the new platform. The focus for the first release was to get basic browsing, and to support the new “Voyager” exploration tools to allow more web-like dynamic content to overlay the geographic content to tell “stories”. I was assured by Google that a lot of effort was going in to incorporate missing power features for the fans of Google Earth. In the meantime, Google assured us they would continue to support the desktop version, and they have indeed (as mentioned here).

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