Google Earth is a software tool that puts a planet's worth of imagery and other geographic information right on your desktop.

View exotic locales like Maui and Paris as well as points of interest such as local restaurants, hospitals, schools, and more.

Want to know more about a specific location? Dive right in -- Google Earth combines satellite imagery, maps and the power of Google Search to put the world's geographic information at your fingertips.

Requirements:

Minimum:
· Operating System: Mac OS X 10.4.0
· CPU: 1 GHz
· System Memory (RAM): 256MB
· Hard Disk: 400MB free space
· Network Speed: 128 Kbits/sec
· Graphics Card: 3D-capable with 16MB of VRAM
· Screen: 1024x768, "Thousands of Colors"

Recommended:
· Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5.2
· CPU: G4 1.2Ghz
· System Memory (RAM): 512MB
· Hard Disk: 2GB free space
· Network Speed: 768 Kbits/sec
· Graphics Card: 3D-capable with 32MB of VRAM
· Screen: 1280x1024, "Millions of Colors"

Here are some key features of "Google Earth":

· Fly from space to your neighborhood. Type in an address and zoom right in.
· Search for schools, parks, restaurants, and hotels. Get driving directions.
· Tilt and rotate the view to see 3D terrain and buildings.
· Save and share your searches and favorites. Even add your own annotations.

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· Improved Startup Time. The improvement is most noticeable when users launch the Earth application multiple times.
· Improved overall rendering performance. Changes include faster atmosphere rendering and using compressed textures whenever possible.
· Improved Road rendering Performance: Frame rate at places with dense road networks is three times faster than in previous releases.
· Improved memory utilization in the application.
· Significantly smoother frame-rate and less stuttering in the application compared to previous releases.
· Improved performance with large region based network link KML documents. Some of large KML documents are now processed and rendered at more than twice the speed of earlier releases.
· Improved KML document handling performance. Large regionated KML Image overlays are up to 80% faster than previous releases.
· Support for KML hint = moon or mars to switch to moon or mars based on kml document.
· Availability of one installer that installs both the Google Earth application and browser plugin.
· Desktop Application now works on Windows 7.
· Users can set the memory cache size up to 1024 MB now.