Planet Earth Windows Gadget

[mcrossley]

A little bit off topic, but some of you may be interested in a Gadget I have written that displays the Earth with the correct Sun illumination and gives you your rise/set times. What makes it of more interest here is that can display the global cloud cover which is updated every three hours.

If you have a look any feedback would be very welcome as I intend to use the same Flash technology for my Moon Phase gadget.

http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail. ... 8afa2c57a5

Cheers

[TNETWeather]

Like it.

The lack of 64bit support is a pain. Surprised that the player doesn't already support that.

[mcrossley]

I was surprised too! Given how prevalent Flash is on the Internet you would have thought Adobe would have sorted it out by now. It also means that Windows 7 64 bit runs IE8 in 32 bit mode by default to get around this (and lots of other browser plugins that are still 32 bit only), shame as IE8 64 bit version is noticably faster.

[geoffw]

Yes I like it as well .... many thanks!

As for 64bit support, I take delivery of a computer with W7 64bit on Friday..... hope this isn't going to me a big problem.

[TNETWeather]

It is one of the few things I've run into with Win7 and that would be today when I loaded the gadget.

I like Win7 quite a bit.

[Super-T]

I am running W7 32bit and have noticed a slight problem with sizing in your gadget.
My screen is set at 125% and I lose the bottom part and the text is wrapping.
Apart from that....looks like a handy tool.

[mcrossley]

Terry

Ah, yes, like most gadgets it doesn't cope with DPI changes very well. There is a new interface in Win7 sidebar for DPI changes, once I get all the functionality sorted I'll have a look at that- it won't fix this problem under Vista though.

[mcrossley]

Terry, I have fixed the DPI scaling issues - under Windows 7 anyway, I can PM you a link to download a preview of version 0.3 if you would like to test it?

Thanks

[Super-T]

New release works well...thanks

[Super-T]

Looks like something has happened to the southern hemisphere cloud data.....we have clear blue skies apparently

[mcrossley]

Lucky you!

The gadget uses three different download sites in a random order each time you start it. So if you restart it may pick a different site and you'll get a complete download - if you're lucky! Unfortunately the incomplete images do happen on occasion.

I have the next release ready now, it has more reliable cloud downloading retries, and I've added optional night-time city lights.

I'll upload it to the gallery tomorrow - if it passes my final testing...

[mcrossley]

v0.3 is now available. This will probably be the final version, I think I have proved that the Flash engine works OK, time to get Moon Phase III completed, this is rather more complex in the 3D rendering as it creates all the crater/mountian shadows as well.

[steve]

I was going to give this a try, but I'm using Windows 7 x64. Are there any issues to watch out for with using the beta Flash runtime?

[mcrossley]

Honestly don't know Steve. I only have x32 systems to test on at the moment. Running the 32bit version of Sidebar shouldn't cause any major performance hit though - I expect you will already be running the 32bit versions of the browsers.