Globe

A tiny desktop Earth globe widget for Windows, with real-time day/night, a flat-map mode, and a growing solar-system view.

Features

• 3D Globe — spins as a toy (up to 2880× real-time) with realistic day/night, city lights on the night side, and an optional grid.
• Flat Map — equirectangular world map with a live real-world terminator.
• Location-aware — pick a home city, detect your location via system GPS/WiFi or IP geolocation, and show a home marker on the globe/map.
• System tray — hide/show, reset view, center on home, settings, about, quit.
• Settings — language (English / 简体中文), view mode, night mode, spin speed, always-on-top, home location.
• About dialog — version, credits, license, and links.

Build

Requirements

• Windows 10/11
• Qt 6.5+ (tested with Qt 6.11.1 msvc2022_64)
• CMake 3.19+
• Ninja
• MSVC 2022 (Visual Studio 17/18) with 64-bit tools

Steps

Open x64 Native Tools Command Prompt (or run vcvars64.bat), then:

cd F:\globe
cmake -B build-msvc -S . -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=C:/Qt/6.11.1/msvc2022_64
cmake --build build-msvc --target earth

Run:

.\build-msvc\earth.exe

To run tests:

cd build-msvc
ctest -C Release --output-on-failure

The app ships an editable data/ip-services.json next to earth.exe so you can change or reorder the IP geolocation services without recompiling.

Acknowledgements

• Earth textures from Solar System Scope
• City data from SimpleMaps World Cities
• Built with Qt6 and OpenGL

License

MIT License — see LICENSE.

Author

Created by HUANG Cheng.

Repository: https://github.com/huangcheng/solar-system