Newest version of Google Earth is awful, save your old v.

[jcarter]

EEEWWWW,  Google Earth warning,,,,,,
My good version of GE is 4.2.205.5730 was acting odd and I had to Force Quit, so I decided to download and use the new one.
Awful, the navigation wheels are funky.  And it is all jerky. And you cannot tilt!
So I trashed it and re-installed my good old version. Thank god I saved it in a separate folder and didnt trash it.
And Im back to being to the good version and it works fine.
It just needed to be reinstalled, this has happened before.
Jane

[MamaMoose]

I have Google Earth version 4.3.7191.6508 (beta) that works just fine on my Quad Mac Pro. What is the "bad" veraion number you have? Also, what makes it bad?

MamaMoose

[jcarter]

I went back to the older version as the navigation tools were much better.  The tilt was right there, and with the new version, I couldnt find the tilt, you were supposed to use a scroll wheel mouse which I dont have(nor want).
The older version was so smooth, just gently move the map with dragging your mouse, and you could let it slowly move while you tilted or zoomed, all at the same time. Just like flying slowly over the earth in a little plane.  

The new one jerked as you were zooming in, tended to spin when you didnt want to turn, and was rather slow.
But I found the navigation tools far inferior, could be just me, but on my husband's new Mac, he has stuck with the older version too.
The only problem with the older version, is once in a while it just freezes and I have to Force Quit it.
But re-installing it solves that problem for a while anyway.
It sure is a great program, but the older one is my favourite for now anyway.
Jane

[Paddy]

I just downloaded and installed 5.0.11337.1968 (beta) for 10.5.6 and it works just fine. Tilt works - it's the top control in the window. Click on the "eye" in the middle of the control to get it to tilt. (otherwise it just turns) My scroll wheel zooms in and out - or you can use the usual slider. I turned off tilt while zooming in the preferences since I don't want it to do that.

No jerkiness or problems with turns.

I did have to trash the preferences before I got it to work - my old version was crashing on startup and so did the new version until I did that. Just tossed all 4 of the Google prefs in my Library preferences folder and everything was fine after that.

Some of the satellite imagery has definitely changed since the last time I looked (I assume updates of that are entirely independent of updates to the app itself!) - my parent's house in Toronto is now clearly visible, with their red Accord parked in the driveway; their neighborhood used to be under a rogue cloud bank! And there is now good close-up satellite imagery of our cottage, which used to be unavailable. Both of those locations were photographed in the winter and everything is clearly visible. Our old house in MA used to have good winter pics - now they've got ones from the summer and you can hardly see anything for all the foliage! I haven't looked at in a while though, and the photos aren't new, since the mess they're making at the Old Town Center in North Andover isn't there yet (they're putting in a roundabout...)

[jcarter]

Hi Paddy,
Oh, That is probably the problem, I will trash those prefs right now.
And will stick with the older version but will try the new one (5) out, keeping the old one like I did before.
The imagery is all the same.

Ive had a question about the $400 'pro' version that I cant really find an answer to yet.
Is the resolution of that paid version much better than the regular version?
I saw somewhere that the local real estate companies have a sat photo service that you can zoom right in to super close up views, you can see the shrubs in yards and almost read license plates.
I wonder if that is available to us?
Wouldnt that be wonderful if you were looking for places to kayak, hike, and see.
Jane

[jcarter]

I couldnt find any GE preferences, and I find Ive got 2 Librarys.
So I think I will go ahead and try the new version 5, whoops, Ive not got Leopard yet, lets see if there is a GE for Tiger that is better.
So looks like that my GE is going to continue to crash on startup all the time now, it never did this until recently.
Still works on my husband's Mac, so thats where I will have to use it.
Jane

[Paddy]

Jane, I'm not sure what the other three prefs did (they've not been recreated) but you should have com.google.GoogleEarthPlus.plist in your (home folder)->Library->Preferences.

Deleting it definitely did the trick for me.

The other thing that you might want to try is deleting the cache files:

(home folder)->Library->Caches->Google Earth and delete dbCache.dat and dbCache.dat.index files

Apparently these are common causes of crashing upon startup as well.

[jcarter]

AH, found them!
Two of them I should say, they were com.Google.GECommonSettings.plist and com.Google.GoogleEarthPlus.plist
Trashed them and now my version is not crashing.
Thank you!!!!
Jane

[Paddy]

Glad it worked!