14 DAY TRIAL // Xeric Design, Ltd. is an American software company located in Nevada that has started back in the early nineties with a program called Time Palette. Born on an old Mac IIcx in 1992, Time Palette helped Xeric Design to establish themselves as a provider of quality products that are backed up by quality support. In the late summer of 2002, Xeric Design started to travel all over the world and maintain their products "on the road", making something that not many others managed to do; however, we're not going to talk about their manner of working, since there's something more interesting to see: namely a product called EarthDesk, recently updated to version 4.0 by Xeric Design.
Yesterday, this "all-over-the-world" company announced the release of EarthDesk 4.0, its real-time dynamic desktop map for Mac OS X. According to the company, this new version of the product has been rebuilt, almost from scratch, as a modern Cocoa product. OK, good, but what's this program good at, after all?
EarthDesk's purpose is to replace your Mac's desktop picture (or Windows wallpaper, for those using the version for this operating system) with a dynamic image of our planet that is continuously updated in the background while you work, so you actually get to see the sunlight moving all over the Earth.
This program features real-time clouds with transparency and moonlight reflection, updated every 3 hours, high quality twilight shading, eleven different map projections and includes both satellite and political maps. With it, you can track hurricanes and typhoons, as well as get detailed geographical and time zone information for over 10,000 cities around the world.
To run EarthDesk, you need Mac OS X 10.4 or later, and the price required to register it is 19.95$, while upgrades are priced at 9.95$ or 12.95$, depending on the status of your existing license. A demo version that displays a watermark image on your desktop is available for download on our site here, as a Universal Binary application.