Blue Planet

Hello followers,

I am back. Had a terrible weekend, not just the earthquake in Japan, also my football team lost and I had no more beer Saturday night. Anyway, things have to go on and so here I  go and present you a nice little tool which i found at the Mac App Store and I think its amazing, you should really check it out:

My new Mac App Blue Planet is now available on the Mac App Store for just $0.99. Blue Planet is a small utility that replaces your desktop picture with a beautiful dynamic map of the Earth. As the day progresses and the sun illuminates different portions of the Earth, the map changes in real-time so you always see where it is day and where night.

You can choose from four gorgeous day images of the Earth, and the night view is even more beautiful in my opinion. The map can be centered on your current location or set to follow the sun. Visit the Blue Planet website for more screenshots and a comprehensive list of features.

If you decide to buy Blue Planet, I’d be very interested in your feedback.

How does it work?

Internally, the map consists of three CALayer objects. The daylight image is the bottommost layer. Above it lies the image of the Earth at night. The area that is currently illuminated by the sun is stored in a CGPathRef. I then create a CAShapeLayer with this path and use the shape layer to mask the night image layer, thereby revealing the day image layer underneath. A Core Image blur filter provides the soft transition from between day and night.
I arrange two of these layer stacks side by side so that I can move from any point on the equator to anywhere else with a smooth animation.
The path that represents the sun-illuminated area of the Earth is recalculated roughly every minute or so. This means that the CPU utilization of Blue Planet is effectively zero.

The website of the developer is here: http://blueplanetapp.com/

So go and check it out, it's really cool to see that you are all sleeping while here is sunny daylight!