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Gabriel Otte
OSXplanet is a Cocoa program that is based on the popular program xplanet (by Hari Nair). It is able to generate live images of the earth as well as other planets in the solar system with additional informations such as the current clouds, storms, satellites, volcanos, earthquakes and times and locations of cities.
What's New
Version 2.0b02 Universal - 09.04.08:
OSXplanet SHOULD work with Tiger. It has not been tested at all. Please give me feedback on this.
The version is now UNIVERSAL.
A few minor bugs have been fixed
PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS A BETA VERSION OF OSXPLANET. IT HAS NOT BEEN TESTED AS MUCH AS IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN. PLEASE REPORT BUGS BY GOING TO WWW.OSXPLANET.COM
OSXplanet is now UNIVERSAL, however, it has not been tested on a PPC machine, so please give me feedback on this. Thanks.
Version 2.0b02 Universal - 09.04.08:
OSXplanet SHOULD work with Tiger. It has not been tested at all. Please give me feedback on this.
The version is now UNIVERSAL.
A few minor bugs have been fixed
PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS A BETA VERSION OF OSXPLANET. IT HAS NOT BEEN TESTED AS MUCH AS IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN. PLEASE REPORT BUGS BY GOING TO more...
Requirements
PPC / Intel, Mac OS X 10.4 or later.
PPC / Intel, Mac OS X 10.4 or later.
OSXplanet User Discussion (Write a Review)
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(31)
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OSXplanet is a Cocoa program that is based on the popular program xplanet (by Hari Nair). It is able to generate live images of the earth as well as other planets in the solar system with additional informations such as the current clouds, storms, satellites, volcanos, earthquakes and times and locations of cities.
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I knew I had to ditch it anyway, with the arrival of Lion. So I went looking for an alternative. I trialed EarthDesk which, while similar, is limiting and also overpriced. Then I discovered Blue Planet, which is a fifth of the price of EarthDesk. It’s similar in functionality to both apps and actually suits me better. Also it is in ongoing development by the developer … that’s all I needed to know.
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well OSXplanet, it's been nice, but you're coming off my hard drive for good unless someone picks up development again. sorry to see you go.
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Get Specified Finder Items
Select Screen 0 in ~/Library/Applicaton Support/OSXplanet/desktop/screen 0
Filter Finder Items
Date Created is not in the last 1 day
Move Finder Items to Trash
set in crontab (using Cronix if you like) to run once a day.
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OSXPlanet, two OS versions and more than three years after its last update, seems to still work just fine :-)
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W_h_k reviewed on 20 Oct 2009
1: Thread creation: OSXplanet starts with 7 threads, but after a few days it runs hundreds of them. Whenever I hit 500 threads, I restart the app.
2. In its desktop folder, OSXplanet keeps ALL screens. At 2,4 MB every 30 minutes, this can grow quite excessive.
3. The memory leak is of minor importance, as the restart due to the thread problem takes care of it.
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My only suggestion is to fade between changing images when updating them for no having the socking flash each time it's updated.
Congratulations and thanks a lot.
aaanouel
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I now simply made that folder read-only in the hope that that will cure the symptom.
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I looked at what effect setting the permissions of the parent folder where all the .png images are stored had on the application. You should have noticed that your desktop no longer updated with a refreshed image as the application can no longer write the new image to that directory and subsequently refresh the image displayed on the desktop with the new one.
To the developer, the way in which this should be implemented is that older images are not stored separately, but either overwritten with the new image, or prior images be erased. When you're on a 2560 x 1600 display and refreshing every 30 min, it takes only a short period of time before this directory becomes a depository for a large amount of wasted hard disk space.
The graphics are superior to Earth Desk and the program is donationware.
I am so happy to see it finally being developed for OSX 10.5.
I donated for earlier versions and I am donating for the latest version.
Everyone should give it a try.
I guarantee you'll find it superior to anything else out there.
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I stopped to use this wonderful little app. some time last year - as far as I remember, it didn't work properly on Leopard.
Now it's back on my desktop. Very appreciated :-)
Maybe a problem with cloud's images servers ? (I run also xplanet on a pc and clouds images are daily updated : but xplanet/pc has a dozen of servers' addresses to scan, instead of osxplanet/mac has only three servers' addresses to scan)
Hoping in an update to fix this problem.
Best regards
1. Visit Real Time Cloud Update at http://xplanet.sourceforge.net/clouds.php
2. Use the preferred download link for the clouds_2048.jpg file; download to desktop.
3. Open ::users:name:Library:Application Support:OSXPlanet:images
4. Replace the existing clouds_2048.jpg file with the newly downloaded file.
5. Select Update Desktop from the OSXplanet menu bar menu.
There is a selection of sources for composite cloud information at Real Time Cloud Update, but I notice that some links now produce blank images. Very probably the original source for OSXplanet is no longer providing this information, so now there's always "a problem downloading cloud data".
It would be great, actually, to be able to choose the source for composite cloud data. The cloud data at sourceforge.net uses Coral to distribute downloads among a number of possible servers, so no single server gets overwhelmed with large data requests.
(Note, if you find clouds_4096.jpg in your images folder, you'd probably want to use the higher resolution link. None of mine do, and I haven't bothered to test the higher resolution image source with OSXplanet.)
lodusi@hotmail.com
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I have been an avid user of OSXPlanet for a number of years but swapped to Earthdesk when it became incompatible with Leopard.
Having recently switched back with the release of 2.0b2 I have also found that after an extended period of being open the app crashes, and istat menus has the program using almost 100% of BOTH cores until the program is force quit.
I also had the problem of it not remembering presets but this seems to have settled down.
I will be reverting to Earthdesk until Gabriel can sort these problems out. Sorry Gabe!
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First and foremost, on my Mac Pro with Mac OS X v.10.5.6 the 2.0b02 app does not graphically remember my main preset settings. I believe at launch it reads the settings from the .plist file stored in ~/Library/Preferences but at times the app by itself begins refreshing the map every minute as the settings have reverted to something other than those originally specified. The only temporary "fix" is to delete the preset listed, add a new one. Then you have to go through and make any changes to the settings that you desire. However, given enough time, the preset settings will again revert to settings that weren't set, and the app begins refreshing the map every minute once again.
The second issue I've noticed is that earthquake data is not visible. The recent 6.1 earthquake in Indonesia never displayed on the desktop; eventhough, my settings explicity state to gather this data for any earthquakes worldwide above a 5.0. Another earthquake recently in San Bernardino was registered as a 5.1 and again was not displayed on the map.
The last issue I've encountered is that the application crashes after an extended period of time open ( > 10 hours normally).
If anyone has any solutions to these issues, then I would certainly appreciate hearing them.
Thanks.
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using macbook (black) with 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4 GB RAM
MAC OSX 10.5.4
rgds
MrMarcuz
/Users/your home/Library/Application Support/OSXplanet
/Users/your home/Library/Preferences/com.gabrielotte.osxplanet1.0.plist
/Users/your home/Library/Preferences/com.gabrielotte.osxplanet2.0.plist
Thanks.
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garvanit@gmail.com rated on 07 Apr 2011