Google Earth has one of the liveliest user/contributor communities around, and there always seems to be people putting the program to new uses. This weekend sees the start of the Tour De France, and if you’d like an interactive map of the grueling route, try this Google Earth file.  Zoom in over a mountainous part, and use tilt to get a good idea of just how painful parts of the race will be! There’s an extended description of the route at creator Thomas Vergouwen’s blog.

All you need to do to view it is open Google Earth, and download the file. Select ‘open with Google Earth’, and you should see the red route with various flags and icons stuck over France. Check back at Thomas’ blog to see if there are real time updates available, so you can track progress on your Google Earth map. Check out this impressive YouTube video flypast of one of the mountain stage:

How are your reactions this friday? They’ll need to be razor sharp if you want to score highly on Zodiac Reactor. It’s a simple timing-reaction puzzle game, where you have to hit one of four keys at the right moment as a corresponding element approaches the Zodiac Reactor. It’s a simple idea, but if you panic for a split second and lose concentration, you are done for.  It takes a minute to grasp, but the introductory tutorial is great. Check it out!

President Obama seems to have a pretty low opinion of video games, and has mentioned them three times recently. He said it was important  that children, ’step away from the video games and spend more time playing outside.’ Maybe that’s a fair point, but the US government has never shown any adult understanding of video games, just kneejerk tabloid reactions.

Do games offer anything more than teaching kids violent or unsocial behaviour? I don’t believe they do either, so I asked around to see what other people thought they had learned from games…

Here’s some of what we came up with:

1: A repeated claim is that they have taught people patience! Not everyone plays patiently, but if, for example you ever played something like Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins, you’ll know that you really need it if you want to complete some games.

2: Reaction times and hand-eye coordination are obviously necessary for lots of games.

3: Problem analysis & creative thinking. Puzzle, adventure and strategy games often require a lot of thought. Have a go at Portal, and you’ll see how games can really challenge you to think differently.

4: One person cited Finances & resource management, as something they’d learnt from games. I can see how that’s possible, but have to admit they have never had that effect on me…

5: Computer literacy. Essential in today’s world, and I’m sure many people of my generation at least got started with computer skills through games. From messing around with Basic on the Commodore 64, to optimizing PCs in the early 90s, games were and are a motivation for learning about your computer in ways that Microsoft Excel never will be.

6: Driving. People had mixed things to say about driving, that they learnt about driving theory from games and also that games taught them they should never drive! I like driving games, because I could never drive like I do virtually on real roads.

Of course, another matter is whether this should be an issue at all. Paintings, movies and music aren’t required to be useful beyond being art. Video games are perhaps getting closer to being considered works of art, but until that happens the media is likely to continue their focus on worries about their negative effects, while ignoring any positive effects they might have.

Do games teach people anything else useful?

You could waste quite a lot of friday with Barbarian Onslaught, a 19 level 2D hack and slash game. As a nameless barbarian, you must roam the lands searching for the secret of steel. You won’t be bored along the way, as there are hordes of mosters and undead-type folk hell bent on removing your head. Make sure to remove theirs first… It’s all really cartoony, and the variety of attacks and finishing moves makes this an enjoyably gruesome experience!

In case you don’t know, OnSoftware is on Twitter: so if you want to keep up with what’s going on here, follow us! Find us here at twitter/softonic_en.

If you don’t use Twitter, why not give it a go? It’s a surprisingly good way to stay up to date with whatever you’re interested in! And if you follow us, we’ll follow you back - meaning you can send us suggestions, tips and software questions that we’ll answer here on the blog.

Hunch.com is a recently launched ‘decision engine’, which has got quite a bit of attention due to one of the company being Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake.

Microsoft’s heavily covered Bing has been called a decision engine - by Microsoft - which I don’t understand as it’s just a search engine. I think it’s a good search engine, for what it’s worth, but not a decision engine. Hunch is what you’d expect a decision engine to be. You ask a question like,

“Should I get an iPhone or a Pre?” and it helps you make a decision. In theory.

It’s still growing, not all questions work, and it’s very much a US site - English people have to remember to say vacation, not holiday! I thought I’d put Hunch through it’s paces and see if I agreed with it. To my first question, above, Hunch said I was 99% in favour of an iPhone. I tried Xbox 360 versus Playstation 3, and was told I was 60% in favour of an Xbox. That’s lucky, as I’ve already got one.

These questions weren’t so hard, though. I could make my own mind up about purchases, so I moved on to more important life issues. First up, “What should I eat for lunch?”. I wasn’t too impressed with Hunch’s answers. It suggested Indian or Chines food, and Pasta. It might as well have suggested I wanted “food” for lunch. I want specifics!

Hunch asks you a series of questions to get to know you better, but it still doesn’t know me that well, so perhaps I should forgive it not being specific.  However, my second important question was “Should I get married?” Personally, I don’t think so: I’m a 21st century citizen, and don’t need such arcane public institutions! However:

…apparently I’m wrong! Should I trust a decision engine more than my own brain? I think I’ll buy an iPhone, go and eat some ‘food’ and think about it.

Crane wars is an almost ready for release game from Flashbang studios, the quirky team behind Paper Moon, Off Road Velociraptor and Minotaur China Shop. You can play a beta 3 version of this browser game here. You control a crane at a construction site, and have to build tower blocks, while watching out for attacks from a neighbouring crane company. You can throw objects at the competition’s buildings, and they can do the same! The game is timed - your budget is constantly being drained, and when it runs out the game is over.

The controls are simple, but building your skyscrapers can be a bit fiddly, especially when someone’s throwing trucks at your creation! Like all of the games on Blurst, Crane Wars is compelling mainly because it’s a cool and ridiculous idea. It was originally scheduled for release today on the Blurst site, so if you don’t fancy playing the beta and want to wait, it shouldn’t be long… As with all Blurst games, you’ll need the Unity browser plug-in.

Little Wheel is a beautifully presented and animated point and click adventure. It’s relatively short, but really enjoyable. Little Wheel takes place in a robot world, which has lain dormant for 10,000 years dues to an accident that left the robots without power. Waking after a lightening strike, your little robot has to journey through the dormant city and bring it back to life. With its quirky, silent robot protagonist and simple though engaging gameplay, Little Wheel is the most charming browser game I’ve played.

Google Earth gets more and more features all the time. Its 3D mapping is always improving, the not very interesting ocean floors have been included as well as historical sites and lots of buildings.

You can now choose to add weather conditions and the sun to your experience. Clicking View - Sun, will add a time slide to the interface. You can now move time, and see the sun rise, set and create shadow all over the globe. All the information is astronomically correct - so you can see the change in sunrises over the year. The sun effect can be quite spectacular. With the weather, which is activated on the sidebar of Google Earth, you simply select Weather, then conditions. You can then click on any weather icon to get a forecast for that place. 

On the same sidebar, there is also a Street View button, giving you the same images you can find on Google Maps in your browser.  It’s not quite as well implemented - moving around is definitely easier in your browser,but it’s still a cool feature. Incidentally, if you haven’t tried the revamped street view in Google Maps, it’s much improved. If you’re looking for a holiday experience, you can now visit a modeled Euro Disney site, and watch the sun go up and down, repeatedly! alternatively, try some mountains for a more epic view.

At the E3 conference, all three console manufacturers announced new motion sensing controllers - from Nintendo’s Wii-motion and Sony’s wand, to Microsoft’s controller-less Project Natal. Along with recent improvements in touchscreen technology, it’s reasonable to conclude control will change quite a lot over the coming months and years.

Here’s Microsoft’s promotional video for Natal

That looks pretty energetic to me!  Like the Wii, I imagine this will be loads of fun, but won’t replace existing controls either - after all, wireless joypads allow you to play in a relaxed way, and sometimes that’s fine. As I wrote a while ago, I think if we treat new methods of control as replacements, we’re in danger of losing good things that aren’t broken.

I would be happy to have a touchscreen monitor, or one that I could manipulate with gestures. But as long as we still use writing, having a physical keyboard will be essential. Watching the PlayStation’s motion controller in action, it looks good, but a little inaccurate - it still looks a lot harder to pick stuff up on screen than it does in real life.

With some development though, it might be a nice way to interact with your Windows desktop. Using your hands to grab things on the screen and move them around would be cool. Personally, I think control from a distance is much more sensible for large devices. A touchscreen for my phone or laptop, but here in the office I wouldn’t want to be stretching to touch my screens all the time.

So far I’ve heard a lot about PC touchscreens but for me - and maybe I’m  lazy - I like the idea of sitting back from a screen, so motion sensing controllers sound much more exciting. How long it takes for anything like this to be adapted for PCs or Windows is anyone’s guess though.

This one’s for people with super human reactions! Bullet Time is a super fast shooter from Terry Cavanagh, developer of many wierd and wonderful indie game experiences.  Here, your challenge is to survive as long as you can. You save up “bullet time”, so when you hold the space bar, the game slows, giving you temporary breathing space. You fire automatically, leaving you free to concentrate on movement. So far, I’ve only managed to survive 20.33 seconds. Can you do any better?

Fans of rhythm games will love Timewarp, a browser game that will really challenge your abilities. It works like Guitar Hero, you have to tap rhythms that are moving towards you. There are a number of keyboard configurations - I prefer the left hand ASDF setup. The twist with TimeWarp is that the better you do, the faster it goes, and the harder it gets. See if your fingers can keep up!

Requires the wonderful Unity plug-in .

Critics of Apple fanatics have said that there’s nothing special about Apple, and it’s unfair for Microsoft to be labeled an uncool big corporation, when Apple is just a big corporation too.

Nevertheless, Apple products do have that special something that makes them likable. In the case of OSX, that special something is just being smooth and fast and working properly.  The iPhone effect on the mobile industry has been incredible. It’s incredible any company could jump into a developed market and revolutionise it just like that, and it’s incredible no established mobile manufacturer had made something that worked that well before.

There is something cool about Apple, and as a corporation they seem to get a lot more right than many. It’s a surprise, then, that the iPhone App Store seems to be getting stuck in controversies.

First was the Babyshaker app, that was bizarrely approved even though it was obviously offensive. Then Apple failed to approve applications for really odd reasons. The Nine Inch Nails app, that would allow users to link to an album with potentially offensive lyrics was banned, despite that material being easily available through iTunes (it was later accepted).

Now we have Eucalyptus, a reader that uses an online library of out of copyright literature. It was rejected on the grounds that you could read Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - an English translation from the 1800s! The developer wisely pointed out this library is freely available on the internet, and you’ll only find that book if you expressly search for it, as you would using Apple’s own Safari. Apple have now accepted the application - but they must have people in their approval system with very strict ideas about objectionable material.

It all seems very un-Apple, and tarnishes their image as “the cool corporation”. Arbitrary bureaucratic absurdity is the thing of governments and faceless corporations - why are Apple doing it? Perhaps these strange decisions are just wrinkles in the system that will be ironed out. There are so many apps being submitted, maybe its not so bad to make the odd mistake.

More Apple Tablet rumours. OnSoftware’s mockups are much better. [TechCrunch]

Twitter continues its meteoric rise. Unlike MySpace. [The Guardian]

New version of Google Chrome may be 30% faster! [GoogleBlog]

Facebook phishing warning/advice: [AllFacebook]

Codemaster’s FUEL out June 5th on PC PS3 and Xbox. Looks great. [Eurogamer]

Vote for your favourite robot [Kotaku]

The lovely people at Valve, one of the best developers around at the moment, are offering a free weekend of multiplayer mayhem in Team Fortress 2. If you’re unacquainted with it, it’s possibly the best multiplayer team shooter out there, with great balance and an emphasis on fun gaming.

The game is available for pre-loading now, and the free weekend should start sometime today, finishing next Tuesday. You’ll have to install Steam, Valve’s download manager, but that’s no bad thing as there’s some fantastic stuff there.