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Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative

109 points luoc 4 hours ago 32 comments

ilumanty 3 hours ago | parent

> 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

carlos-cute 3 hours ago | parent

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 !

rob74 3 hours ago | parent

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?

simmschi 2 hours ago | parent

Ah, doesn't work on Sequoia 15.8.x. I wonder what features my Mac is missing to display a sphere with data.

elAhmo 2 hours ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

macOS 27 min version lmao

ModernTimes 55 minutes ago | parent

To the developer, please just add this line to your prompt: "ensure it works on the 2 previous versions of MacOS".

planb 50 minutes ago | parent

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.

dr_dshiv 2 hours ago | parent

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

Https://Earthlove.live

sebslomski 2 hours ago | parent

Terravision

jttnr 2 hours ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

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.

And yes, project is not even F/LOSS. 3D mouse recommended, this guy is aloft from the rest of human civilization.

unkeen 1 hour ago | parent

Exactly my thoughts. In the end, he's just a pretty regular guy who exchanged his once high standards for the "enabling" factor of AI, striving for mediocrity now. Really sad and disappointing.

rented_mule 27 minutes ago | parent

Are you saying Keyhole copied Terravision when they created EarthViewer? Google Earth was a rebranding, with continued development, of Keyhole EarthViewer after Google bought Keyhole.

manol74 2 minutes ago | parent

Terravision started much earlier than Keyhole, however the lawsuit agains Google wasn't successful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terravision#History

There is also a Netflix Mini-series inspired by the case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Billion_Dollar_Code

KaiserPro 2 hours ago | parent

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

walrus01 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

Some features of KML and KMZ don't work on Geolibre, while working on Kugelblitz surprisingly!

rrr_oh_man 1 hour ago | parent

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.

sofayam 1 hour ago | parent

Strange, nothing in those two paragraphs sounds particularly LLM-like to me. What am I missing?

eproxus 51 minutes ago | parent

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 29 minutes ago | parent

"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 minutes ago | parent

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.

nomnomno 5 minutes ago | parent

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.

luoc 1 minute ago | parent

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...

flohofwoe 1 hour ago | parent

> 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 ;)

andai 37 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

Even on M1? Didn't Google Earth run smoothly when it came out? (Which was apparently 25 years ago, oh my goodness!)

Nekorosu 33 minutes ago | parent

I was going to highlight the same thing. M1 is very powerful and this kind of application would be more limited by the amount of unified RAM. If it works well on 8Gb it's a good one. Mentioning M1 like this actually makes the app look bad.

kiwibyproxy 23 minutes ago | parent

did you check out the page? this features a "flying mode" in 3D terrain, streamable to Vision Pro

flohofwoe 13 minutes ago | parent

It's still doing nothing that a 20 year old flight simulator wouldn't be able to do. The one potential performance problem on a laptop with HighDPI display might be the pixel fillrate to render at full resolution, but the pixel shaders in Google Earth should be extremely cheap, and if that's not enough it could drop down to half resolution with 4x MSAA without much quality loss (but an M1 GPU easily has enough oompfh per pixel on a Retina display for what Google Earth needs to render).

walrus01 27 minutes ago | parent

There's a ton of single threaded performance problems in Google Earth Pro if you watch its activity closely, when you have something like 150MB-300MB of KML placemark lat/long locations and lines loaded. Moving to a new geographic area will cause it to re-read the entire KML for an area and render the placemarks/lines onto the map using *only one CPU core* no matter the capability of your system. There's tons of other things it does with only one core.

Load the fiber maps for a facilities based ISP that spans a few county size up to a whole state size of scale, with good granular detail (like splice case and pedestal locations, etc) and watch Google Earth Pro slow to an absolute crawl even on a $599 current gen Intel core-whatever or AMD Ryzen single socket workstation CPU.

To be fair to it, people are trying to do all kinds of things these days with KML files that it really wasn't designed for, or ever intended for, and are much better done with professional grade GIS software.

tomaskafka 27 minutes ago | parent

For agents, M1s are the ancient machines, made long before they were born, and, the horror, barely enough to provide enough nutrients to even a small LLM.