New Software To Be Reviewed Review

I have to start by saying that I've never been a great fan of screensavers or of any other kind of seemingly resource-draining applications that only serve as eye-candy, but Earth 3D Space Survey ScreenSaver is different.

The first thing that I'd noticed after having fired up the application is that the screensaver was astonishingly beautiful. A very well rendered image of the earth appeared and displayed the planet from all sides.

The image of the Earth alternates with sequences depicting the moon. A very nice lens flare (or rather sun flare) effect accompanies the spinning planets and serves to make the scene all that more pleasant.

Besides the great 3D animations, the screensaver also features a very interesting set of images of the earth. The images depict major cities, hurricanes, lakes, maps, etc. These images that constantly alternate, also have captions attached to them. Furthermore, information boxes about the Earth appear throughout the entire screensaver activity.

An interesting feature of the screensaver is also its clock. Configurable to show AM/PM or a 24 hour system, the clock displays in the lower right hand side of the screen and is very useful in informing you of the time. The best thing about it is that it's quite big and, thus easily viewed from a distance.

In fact, all the items of the screensaver can be configured - you can opt to show the images and information boxes, or not, as well as change the view mode to display the moon, or not. So, certainly, this is a very configurable screensaver.

The downsides of the application are that: the information displayed and the earth/moon cycle do not coincide. That means that you might have information displayed on screen about the Earth when, in fact, the Moon is showing. Another minor inconvenience is that the application becomes somewhat repetitive after a while (a random change of starry background would have helped to alleviate that).