Google Earth Pro is Free!

Google Earth Pro As of a few days ago, Google Earth Pro is now free. Google Earth Pro is a mapping/virtual globe/geographical application and service which used to cost $399 per year, and is obviously the “pro” version of the popular and free Google Earth.

Google Earth is a popular (and useful) application for those conducting genealogy research. It can help you in situations where you can’t physically visit an area, say a farm or a house tied to an ancestor, and it can also help you plan genealogy-related trips.

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Metes and Bounds 4.6

Metes and Bounds 4.6.0 was released a few days ago. Metes and Bounds is a long-time application that allows you to work with geographic data, including creating deed plot maps. It also calculates the area of those plots (including square feet, acreage, and hectares), and can support measurement in rods, chains, meters, yards, inches, fathoms, hands, spans, or furlongs.

It can be handy if you are doing a lot of research into plots and working with surveys, and have measurements or other data available. It does support GPS waypoints. It’s $29.95 for the basic version, $69.95 for the pro version. For more information, see the website.

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Metes and Bounds 3.8.0

Metes and Bounds 3.8.0 has been released by Sandy Knoll Software. It’s a fairly significant release – several new additions to the software. Metes and Bounds is a cross-platform application (Mac, Windows, Linux) that allows you to take raw data and turn it into deed plot maps. It can calculate … Read more

HoudahGeo 2.8

HoudahGeo has been updated to version 2.8.

With this release, Houdah Software is dropping support for Mac OS X 10.4. Houdah Software has also improved and enhanced the error handling for errors occurring during exporting or uploading of photos.

HoudahGeo is a geocoding application that works with your photos and GPS information to help you manage location information for all of your photos. HoudahGeo can actually write latitude, longitude, and altitude information to your image file, with no alteration of the image or its quality – it uses EXIF, XMP, and IPTC tags to store this information.

If you want to do more than add the geocoding information, you can take those photos that have been geotagged by HoudahGeo and work with them within Google Earth, as well as export to Flickr, Locr, or EveryTrail.com. There is also a built-in map that can be used to display the photo locations.

If your photos were taking with an iPhone or other device that has integrated GPS hardware, it can use that information. It can also work with dedicated GPS devices, and can read GPX/NMEA files.

It does integrate/interface nicely within Apple’s iPhoto and Aperture as well as Adobe’s Lightroom, and you can browse and work with those images from within HoudahGeo. It can also update the Places database in iPhoto ’09/’11 (as of HoudahGeo 2.7.1) and Aperture 3.

Many of us work with a lot of photos and a lot of location information and this might be useful to try out.

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iScrapBook 3.0.8, Metes and Bounds 3.3.1

iScrapBook 3.0.7 was introduced a few days ago, and there was a small bug that dealt with cropped images with image effects. iScapBook is exactly what its name implies – scrapbooking software for Mac OS X. iScrapbook 3.0.8 * Fixed problem where cropped images with image effects would sometimes draw … Read more

iPhoto ’09 – Overview

I have to say, I’m very impressed with iPhoto ’09. “Faces” has been added to iPhoto as a way to organize and tag your photos. Once you’ve started assigning names to photos, it automatically “recognizes” photos with those other people, and labels them accordingly. Facial recognition is something I’ve seen … Read more