We strive to deliver the best product for our customers. The fact is that we can't guarantee a third party service. It is the same for any app that relies on internet-based data such as banking, weather or news feeds.

Our original cloud data provider is now charging $36/yr. We've been able to double that detail level (well beyond what we ever offered in the past) for $9.95/yr as an optional service.

We have also increased the detail level of the free cloud service as much as possible... a far better solution than simply ending the service entirely.

We plan to keep improving both free and paid services.

Egregi signori, credo che chiedere una fee appena 40 giorni dopo averci venduto il software, anche se a prezzo scontato, sia molto scorretto.

Utilizzeremo gratuitamente le mappe ad alta risoluzione dal sito della NASA.

Renzotavanti: Yes, NASA maps are free, but they are static. The cloud images change many times a day and while the data may be free, the bandwidth to deliver them is not free. Our image provider (which had supplied them for free since 2005) simply stopped a few days prior to the bundle sale... and had we done nothing, there would have been no clouds at all.

So now XERIIC wants to charge $10-$25 per year just to download cloud data? HAHAHAHAH! Let's just see how that business money works out for ya. If you do that, then drop the frackin' control panel price to $10! XERIC charges $25 for this toy. That's a quarter of Apple's price of the entire OSX operating system. I think the control panel is OK, besides being a bit of a resource hog. It does makes a interesting desktop display. I've owned every version since the first, but the clouds do look like clumps of cheese curd oozing across the globe. But to ask people to pay a subscription fee just to make EarthDesk do and look the way it should have in the first place, that's just greed oozing out your Xeric gills. BTW, there are plenty of free or much cheaper programs that do much of what EarthDesk does.

Kosovar1: This data has been provided for free by a third party since we started offering clouds in 2005. It was mostly a volunteer organization and often used university networks.

That service stopped about a month ago and we simply can't afford to spend several hundred dollars per day to transfer the data (more than a terabyte per day).

I already paid for a fully functioning copy of Earthdesk which includes high-resolution cloud data. I was just notified that functionally of my fully-paid-for copy will be crippled unless I start paying an annual fee. I already paid, and I did not pay for a crippled version.

Can you please contact our support so we can get a screen capture of this? I have looked at the cloud servers and the images are currently ok (sometimes one or more of the satellites transmits a corrupt image). It is working here for me.

Thank you,

Trygve Inda
President, Xeric Design

milky white at the bottom of the map? is there actually graphics corruption, or are you talking about antarctica? lol

I'm seeing this as well on OS X 10.6. The clouds image appears to get corrupted and pixelated at the bottom of the map. The workaround is to delete the jpg at ~/Library/Application Support/EarthDesk/Clouds and then force an update in EarthDesk.

Can you please contact us to supply more details about your hardware and some samples of what you are seeing?