Google Earth for OS X 10.4

After the false alarm of a week ago, Google Earth is really out for OS X -- in beta and for 10.4 only. At last, a good reason to upgrade to 10.4. My old iBook would never have had the horsepower to run it anyway ...

Official Google Blog: Google Earth in a Mac world (PC too)

1/10/2006 12:49:00 PM
Posted by Chikai Ohazama, Google Earth Team

... And we have a brand new member of the family -- Google Earth for Macintosh. We're happy to finally have some good news for the, ahem, vocal Mac enthusiasts we've been hearing from. Let's just say that we have gotten more than a few 'requests' for a Mac version of Google Earth. They've gone something like this:

1) 'When is it coming out? Your website says that you are working on it.'

2) 'You know, Mac users are very heavy graphics/mapping/visualization/design/ architecture/education/real estate/geocaching/social-geo-video-networking fans who would certainly use Google Earth a lot.'

3) 'So when is it coming out?'

We heard you loud and clear. The Mac version runs on OS X 10.4 and up. Happy travels throughout Google Earth, whether you're on a Mac or a PC."

The PC version is out of beta. Time for me to upgrade, though I if the OS X version works I won't be doing that much on the PC version.

The windows download page also lists some interesting Google Earth RSS overlays.

Update 1/10: The OS X page has the same overlays. I highly recommend the Wikipedia overlay, it links articles to locations. Panoramio overlays images on the earth. I had to download them to the desktop and then tell OS X to open them with Google Earth, it wasn't quite as simple as Google's overlay page suggested.

Pretty darned incredible. The performance and appearance on the iMac is beautiful so far.