Catfood Software Blog

 

Winter Solstice 2009 in Catfood Earth

It's the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere and the official start of winter. Happy Holidays!

Winter Solstice 2009 in Catfood Earth

Rendered using Catfood Earth.

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Posted by Rob on 12/21/2009, 0 comments. (Bookmark & Share)

 

Catfood Earth 3.00

Catfood Earth 3.00 is now available for download.

Catfood Earth updates your Desktop wallpaper to show a satellite image of the Earth's surface combined with many optional layers of information. Layers include cloud cover, the extent of daylight and nightime, time zones and earthquakes. The result is a beautiful and continually changing background for your computer.

Earth is an update to Catfood Desktate. Existing Desktate customers can upgrade to Earth at no cost. If you're new to Earth download the free 7 day trial or purchase Earth for $19.95 from the Catfood Store.

Catfood Earth Settings

New themes make it easy to configure Earth with the recommended settings for a number of views. The Natural theme approximates Earth from space. Time Zones color codes countries and regions and updates throughout the year as daylight savings rules change around the world. Earthquakes shows quake data from the USGS.

Catfood Earth - Natural Theme

Once you've selected a theme you can fully customize each layer, including colors, text size, image sources and transparency.

I'd like to thank all the beta testers who provided feedback and encouragement over the past few months. People use Earth for lots of different reasons and the flexibility in 3.00 is due to learning more about this from both long time Desktate customers and new Earth users.

Catfood Earth supports Windows XP, Vista and 7. Download Earth to get started.

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Posted by Rob on 12/07/2009, 0 comments. (Bookmark & Share)

 

Catfood Earth Animations

Two videos created using Catfood Earth Beta.

The first shows time zone changes in 2009. You'll see various countries and regions changing zone as they enter and leave daylight savings time. The animation compresses an entire year into a few seconds:



The second is an update to Seasons, a video created in Catfood Desktate. It shows the extent of daylight and nighttime over the course of a year. You can also see snow and ice cover and vegetation growing and dying back - barely noticeable in Catfood Earth but dramatic in the animation:



The videos were created by rendering a sequence of frames in Catfood Earth. I then used ImageToAVI to create an animation from the frames and uploaded to YouTube. The render frames feature will be available in the full release of Catfood Earth 3.00.

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Posted by Rob on 12/06/2009, 0 comments. (Bookmark & Share)