The shading affects how factors such as the moonlight are interpreted, and you can opt between real lighting, full moon in the night areas, no moon in the night areas and daylight only.Ĭentering affects where the focus is placed on the map you can either go for some predefined values such as the map origin, the equatorial sunset, sunrise, moon set and moonrise, or choose a city such as the one you live in. The image type is basically a toggle between a geographical map and a political one. You can either go with a 'map like' projection such as equirectangular, Van Der Grinten, Mercator, and many others, or you can go with a globe projection that gives you the 'look from outer space' feel. The projection affects how the earth is displayed. As time passes and the earth revolves, day and night move about the continents, clouds form and dissipate, swirl and twist as they are carried by the winds, all this information is used by the program to render the desktop image of the earth, giving you a constantly changing, never the same desktop.ĮarthDesk can show the earth in many different ways, depending on four factors: projection, image type, shading and centering. All of them, however, suffer from the same limitation, in that they are images, static pixels of which we eventually get bored.ĮarthDesk is different in that the desktop image is being constantly updated and never looks the same twice. The desktop has always been the subject of preference and there are so many desktop pictures or wall papers, or whatever you want to call them out there that it would take many human lifetimes just to browse through them all. There are multiple ways of viewing the earth, and factors such as the distribution of light and current cloud patterns can be used in the rendering of the image to give a beautiful and time-accurate representation of the earth.
#Earthdesk pace update#
In a nutshell, EarthDesk is a program that will generate a desktop picture of the earth, and will update that desktop image constantly in order to reflect the current conditions. EarthDesk is a perfect example of such a program. We're not talking about widgets here, because most of them actually have a purpose beyond looking pretty, but rather the esthetic programs that we download and use simply because we can and they look good. There are certain programs out there, which serve no real purpose but without which our computing experience would be just a little bit more drab.
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