MVWorldviewer - Dynamic World Map for Your Desktop

The weather report represents a constant in our lives while news about storms and earthquakes frequently make the headlines. Still we don't always fully realize the magnitude of these phenomena. MVWorldviewer is able to put things into perspective by displaying a real time representation of the Earth.

Although all media channels are filled with more and more alarming messages concerning our planet's current situation, and messages about how we should protect the environment, it’s still hard to fully understand the consequences of our actions and that Earth is a living ecosystem.

Conventional maps, no matter how detailed, cannot fully grasp the planet’s status and behavior. At a closer look, the popular agreement that you can never trust the weather man, starts to make sense and the reasons why this reality makes part of our life become obvious.

In theory, Edward Norton Lorenz’s Butterfly Effect explains how the slightest change in a system can lead to extreme events. Applied to our reality, the concept is extremely relevant when dealing with the weather.

Each moment, an event can go one way or the other and start a different chain of events. As a result, a meteorologist can only calculate the probability of a certain event, based on previous experiences.

To use one of  Edward Norton Lorenz’s most popular metaphors, a storm might be the result of the movement imprinted by a butterfly’s wing.

Being surrounded by the latest technological discoveries we forget that nature is indeed an unstoppable force, ruled in the end by hazard, and that, most importantly, the system changes affect each and every one of us.

MVWorldviewer is designed to provide a graphical representation of this holistic view of Earth, by putting on your desktop a dynamic world map with the current day and night representations, cloud maps, earthquakes, storms and your local weather forecast.

The Looks

At launch, MVWorldviewer will put the world map on your desktop, replacing your wallpaper. By default the map is refreshed every ten minutes, but the status bar menu allows you to refresh it manually at any time.

When that happens an hourglass will be displayed on the status bar icon, during the entire process. Once the application stops running everything comes back to normal.

The Works

MVWorldviewer is extremely easy to use and can be managed through the status bar menu that provides easy access to the application’s preferences window.

MVWorldviewer will place on your desktop a realtime map displaying the day and night separation of the globe, showing Sun and Moon symbols in order to specify the moving direction. The data is offered by NASA and is juxtaposed with a cloud map provided by the Xplanet project.

On the map you will also be able to see, organized by a color code, the earthquakes that have occurred within the last week: red for the last few hours and orange for the ones within the last day.

For the earthquakes that are older than a day, the color code changes taking the magnitude into account: dark green for the weakest and bright red for the strongest.   MVWorldviewer also allows you to monitor the current storms, using data from University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy. For each one it will display the name, type (tropical depression, cyclone or hurricane), wind strength and path.

On the bottom left corner you will be able to see the weather forecast and current condition for a city of your choice (keep in mind the forecast is available only for US cities).

The forecast will display the high and low temperature and a summary for the current day. The current conditions area will show the current temperature, humidity, pressure, wind speed and direction.

Although the NOAA website offers more data, the type of the information received cannot be changed in any way. For example the user cannot choose to see the air and water temperature even if the data is available.   Initially, the MVWorldviewer map will be seen as your wallpaper, but the Preferences window allows you to set a keyboard shortcut to enable the fullscreen mode. This way your entire desktop will display the map and the Dock, status bar and desktop icons will disappear.

In fullscreen mode the earthquakes and the forecast data become hyperlinks leading to the NOAA and US Geological Service websites for details about each event.

In fact the Preferences window offers many more customization options. First of all you have the possibility to set the longitude to be used as the center of the map and add several cities to be displayed.

To add a new city you must know its longitude and latitude and note that for south and west longitudes and latitudes the values must be entered as negatives.

The process is not exactly user friendly considering you must look for your self the longitude and latitude of each city. Also, MVWorldviewer does not allow you to zoom out the map in any way and only shows vague country delimitations.

The same location allows you to change the forecast city and allows you to specify the data you want to see: cities, clouds, forecast, the Equator and Tropics lines, quakes, storms and the Sun and Moon symbols.

MVWorldviewer allows you to make sure the quakes are not overlapping, set the minimum earthquake magnitude and the measurement units for temperatures (Fahrenheit, Celsius or Kelvin) and speed (MPH or KPH).

When it comes to rendering you can choose one of the following fade effects: fast fade, laser, copy machine, flash, blobs, ripple or cube rotate.

Note that in demo mode MVWorldviewer is quite limited and only displays only one day weather forecast, one custom city, one tropical storm, the three most recent earthquakes and the cloud map will be updated once in 24 hours.

Unfortunately these limitations do not allow you to see the application’s behavior when dealing with a lot of information.

The Good

The Bad

The Truth