EarthDesk: The Most Beautiful Desktop In The World

Posted by Jordan Golson on 05/21/07 in Fun & Unique

EarthDesk Icon Some people spend hours and hours trying to find the perfect desktop picture. Some rotate through their iPhoto libraries to show vacation images or put up pictures of their kids. Some people have pictures of cars, women, or even Windows logos. My search for the perfect desktop background ended when I found EarthDesk.

EarthDesk Desktop

EarthDesk is part Geochron, part weather map. A map of the Earth is displayed on your desktop overlaid with a composite satellite image showing up-to-date cloud cover and a shadow depicting daylight, moonlight and night on the map.

It makes for a beautiful and informative desktop background, and encourages me to keep my desktop clean so I can see the entire map!

There are numerous options including settings for how often to update the map, whether to show moonlight or night, where to center the map, numerous different map projections, and an option between a Living Earth map and a political map. EarthDesk 4.0 is a system preference panel so you don’t have to worry about extra icons in the dock, but there is an optional menu control.

EarthDesk Preference Panel

If you’re always looking for that perfect desktop image, EarthDesk may be for you. I bought it several months ago and haven’t been tempted to change my desktop image once. EarthDesk is $19.95 from Xeric Design, and a free trial is available.

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5 Comment(s)

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muaddib420 said on

May 21st, 2007 at 12:48 pm

looks nice and all, but how much of a system hog is this? my macbook runs hot enough as it is!

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Jordan Golson said on

May 21st, 2007 at 1:58 pm

EarthDesk spreads the rendering out over whatever period you specify.

On my MBP, refreshing every 5 minutes, it uses 0.9% of a single processor’s potential. Not much at all, I think. You can make it 10 or 20 minutes and drop that percentage down further if you find it’s taking up too much CPU juice.

Steve said on

May 21st, 2007 at 4:54 pm

Personally, I prefer OSXPlanet (http://www.osxplanet.com/). It’s free, doesn’t hog resources, very configurable and does much the same job. Did I mention it was free?

John said on

May 22nd, 2007 at 12:40 am

This is also available for Windows. I tried it ages ago. Fun for awhile but loses its shine really quick.

Dan Booring said on

May 22nd, 2007 at 4:04 pm

I just installed this and love it.