Kugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative

Posted by luoc 10 hours ago

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Comments

Comment by andai 6 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.

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

Comment by Nekorosu 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by kiwibyproxy 6 hours ago

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

Comment by flohofwoe 6 hours ago

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).

Comment by 4 hours ago

Comment by echoangle 5 hours ago

FSX from 2006 had 3D terrain you could fly over and streaming to a VR headset isn’t that hard either. An oculus Quest has effectively mobile phone power and can run VR games on device.

Comment by someguyiguess 4 hours ago

Yeah in 480p

Comment by 5 hours ago

Comment by VMG 4 hours ago

There is a Netflix miniseries about how two German underdog hackers built the first Google Earth precursor in 1994(!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Billion_Dollar_Code

(IIRC the premise was that the underdogs invented something like mipmaps, which I found hard to believe. The core tech was probably already invented by 3d shooters at that time)

Comment by LukaD 3 hours ago

It's not the same mipmapping that games use really, but dividing the map data into a quadtree with progressively finer resolutions.

It's more like turning mipmapping into a paging system.

Comment by jandrewrogers 1 hour ago

In the earliest days it required expensive GPUs to run well.

Comment by walrus01 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by tomaskafka 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by LoganDark 1 minute ago

> even a small LLM

So, a medium language model?

Comment by richardstahl 5 hours ago

Kudos to Tim for creating this! In the last Freakshow Podcast he gave a walkthrough of how he created it.

https://freakshow.fm/fs313-der-tripelpunkt-der-metaebene

As other commenters said: TerraVision vibes.

Comment by rob74 8 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?

Comment by throwaway27448 10 minutes ago

WOW instant download

Comment by marcelox86 2 hours ago

this kind of app would really benefit from having NSScrollEdgeEffectStyle set to .soft. the huge toolbars (which tbf, is the fault of Liquid Glass, not the developer) and their opaque background takes away a lot of space that could be a peripheral for the map with NSScrollEdgeEffectStyle.

also, the Hide Toolbar option hides the traffic lights too...? this isn't standard macOS behavior...

Comment by motoroco 1 hour ago

what data sources are you using for the global satellite imagery? I’m building mosaics for my own app but don’t have the pockets to pay for licensed data right now. NAIP is fantastic for the US but I’d really like to get z16+ coverage for Europe, too

Comment by Drake_Rubicon 1 hour ago

The app only uses public available sources. Have a look at the library section for a overview or the current used data sources:

https://apps.metaebene.me/en/kugelblitz/features/library

Comment by sebslomski 8 hours ago

Terravision

Comment by jttnr 7 hours 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...

Comment by a3w 7 hours 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.

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

Comment by jttnr 5 hours ago

I partially agree. There was a time when Tim was hardly bearable, especially toward the end of CRE, but in my opinion, things have improved in recent years.

Comment by avhception 4 hours ago

Was there an official "end" of CRE? I was still hoping for new episodes some day.

Comment by jttnr 4 hours ago

Not sure, there is no indication on the website. Maybe its just an extra long pause.

Comment by unkeen 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by rented_mule 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by manol74 5 hours ago

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

Comment by carlos-cute 9 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 !

Comment by dr_dshiv 8 hours ago

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

Https://Earthlove.live

Comment by KaiserPro 7 hours ago

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

Comment by ilumanty 9 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

Comment by simmschi 8 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.

Comment by elAhmo 7 hours 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.

Comment by planb 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by simmschi 4 hours ago

Yeah, sorry I didn't mean to sound salty. I was just a bit surprised, this is the first application that refuses to run on my M4 macbook. Maybe time to upgrade OSX :)

Comment by ModernTimes 6 hours ago

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

Comment by dkmar 7 hours ago

macOS 27 min version lmao

Comment by flohofwoe 7 hours ago

> 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 ;)

Comment by rrr_oh_man 7 hours 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.

Comment by luoc 5 hours ago

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...

Comment by unkeen 3 hours ago

Doesn't make it better, does it.

Comment by sofayam 6 hours ago

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

Comment by eproxus 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by coldtea 6 hours ago

"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.

Comment by paulhilbert 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by coldtea 5 hours ago

>No, it's not. It sounds exactly like Tim Pritlove when he speaks German

Germans are still LLM, just in human form.

Comment by morsch 3 hours ago

> as opposed to using "freely available geodata" through mediators?

I think that's the idea, yes. Usually the mediator is the publisher of the software who at least maintains a proxy, but often recombobulates the data in a way that makes for sense for their software. This is also doesn't leave the original publisher paying for the software user's traffic. Probably not much an issue for a first release.

Comment by nomnomno 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by 3 hours ago

Comment by ilumanty 3 hours ago

Nobody hates Germans more than Germans

Comment by a3w 3 hours ago

He is working on this since at least 1993, as in: longer than Duke Nukem Forever.

And whenever HE talks about Software, his feedback is even much worse. Since this is about the piece of software, not the person, we should criticise at will.

As for the person: he usually claims other peope lack his standards in crafting good products with an intelligent choice of ... ? object oriented language X/Y/Z, whatever buzzword he claims is best. Coders gonna code the way they like, but he loudly claims his way if superior since it makes less mistakes. As we all strive, unless we embace the Cuck Coding and/or that perfect is the enemy of good.

Oh, the irony in defending even that guy against clones of himself.

Comment by frnz 5 hours ago

and, and! It's Mac OS 27 only! I mean, really?

Edit: I can't switch since I need some older intel apps...

Comment by vessenes 2 hours ago

Can we pay $4 to have the AI only build the software and not the marketing materials?

Comment by mikojan 4 hours ago

Please just fix Apple Maps

Comment by jameshart 1 hour ago

Apple Maps is pretty impressive these days. Did you file a bug report for your specific problem?

Comment by walrus01 7 hours 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/

Comment by bbaid 7 hours ago

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

Comment by damwwoo 2 hours ago

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Comment by zhangrenhui 10 hours ago

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