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Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative

76 points by luoc 3 hours ago | 13 comments

rob74 2 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?

sebslomski 47 minutes ago

Terravision

jttnr 27 minutes 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 2 minutes 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.

This project is not even F/LOSS.

KaiserPro 19 minutes ago

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

carlos-cute 2 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 !

walrus01 14 minutes 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/

ilumanty 2 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

rrr_oh_man 40 seconds 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.

simmschi 2 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 23 minutes 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.

dkmar 9 minutes ago

macOS 27 min version lmao

dr_dshiv 54 minutes ago

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

Https://Earthlove.live

zhangrenhui 3 hours ago

[dead]