Take a walk or a sea voyage with Google Earth (earth.google.com)

Member Name: Vialdana

Product:	earth.google.com
Date:	21/06/09 (27 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Free! Easy to use, useful, fun.

Disadvantages: none at all.

Google Earth is fast becoming like a favourite friend to me as I learn more and more about what it's useful for.

The Basics:
Google Earth is a free to download program which lets you zoom in to anywhere on the earth and look around. There are many different layers which you can place over your view of where ever you are looking at to assist you in whatever your task might be at the time.

Using The Program:
When I first started using Google Earth, I was quite impressed by the simplicity of the way it works. Whether you're someone who's used to computers (like me) or someone who's a bit of a novice (like my step dad), it's actually very useable and friendly. The first thing most people do when they go on Google Earth is to look for their own house. You can do this one of two ways, you can use the mouse and zoom in on the big part of the screen which is where the map is until you find what you are looking for (this can take a while if you start with a view of the whole globe!). Or you can use the search facility on the left hand side and put in either your address or postcode, or even just street or town. If it's not sure what you want it will offer you several alternatives that you can select from and then when you click one it will fast zoom in to it and stop giving you a perfect over view of that location.

For me, I played doing this for quite a long time, finding places I knew and looking at them. Then I discovered that there were other things I could do like putting a pin into the map and marking what it was - soon the map had lots of pins... my house, my mums house, my husbands parents house, my old school, where I went on my honeymoon, where we stayed on our last holiday... you get the picture. Then I learned you could use a ruler to stretch a line and see how long something is. I mapped the distance from my home to other places as the crow flies. I even measured how long my plot where my house is from front to back!

There are actually lots of other features that you don't notice at first, I mentioned layers earlier - well these are really useful, they're things like being able to turn on road names so you can see which street something is on. Being able to turn on (or off) things like places of interest and terrain and various other things (hey I'm still learning ;-) ).

Oh, another feature is you can stop looking at the ground, and instead you can look at the sky as viewed from that position on the earth. Now, trust me, even if you didn't have any fascination for the stars before, this kind of makes you want to look at them. I've found myself looking at the map and then going outside to try and see if I can find certain stars in the sky, it's kind of cool when you can too.

My Favourite Use for Google Earth (at the moment):
Right now, I'm using Google Earth to try and find nice walks that I can manage. I can't walk too far at a time you see because I have fibromyalgia, so being able to look on here and zoom in and find somewhere that my husband and I can drive to, park, and where I can walk is brilliant. I can even zoom in close enough that I can normally tell if there are benches on the path I'm thinking of walking so I know there will be places I can stop and sit. There's another use I found for that ruler... well you can plot the path and see how far it is to walk round a certain route. It's helping me to know how far I'm managing to walk at a time which is great!

Do I recommend Google Earth:
Oh my yes! Look, firstly, it's free - well you can't get much cheaper than that, can you! Secondly it's really fun to play with, and thirdly it's actually really useful. My step dad likes to find fishing spots using it, I've found walks I can manage, I've even been able to use it to show my husband the area I grew up in without us leaving the house. Definitely one to install if you can.

Summary: Another fabulous piece of software from Google. Fun, Useful, and Free, what more could you ask.