Some software you buy because it's how you earn a living, some because it's eminently practical. EarthDesk is neither of these things, but it gets a resounding thumbs-up from us, despite, or rather because of, this. Its sole purpose is to replace your desktop picture with an updating 'live' view of the planet. We need to qualify 'live' in these circumstances: there isn't a dedicated satellite circling the earth beaming down images. Instead, the software uses a series of flat graphics to create an accurate view of the sun's progress across the face of our home planet. These composite images - sunlit, dark, illuminated by the reflected sunlight from the moon - are rendered together by the software. While the main view isn't live in the most accurate sense of the word, EarthDesk does pull down live images of cloud cover every three hours so you can see major weather patterns develop.
You can change the projection type, ranging from the prosaic equirectangular and Mercator, to more exotic choices such as Hammer (the map type between a photorealistic version or a political representation), and the level of zoom.
EarthDesk lets you set view options on a per-display basis, and this latest version does now properly work with multi-monitor setups, such as when a laptop is occasionally connected to a larger display.
The other big difference in this latest version is that EarthDesk is no longer an application that takes up space in your dock: it's now configured through a simple System Preference pane or by a new menu bar icon.
Performance has been improved, too - remember that because all it's doing is periodically replacing a flat image as your desktop picture with an updated version, there's little impact on your system. Rendering takes place in the background between updates, using around 2% of our test MacBook's CPU.
Even though the changes from previous versions aren't huge, we still don't mind the upgrade price. At around a tenner for new customers, it's a cheap way to brighten up your day.
Author: Christopher Phin
MacUser Online