Real-time satellite imagery on your desktop.
Watch sunlight and weather patterns move across Earth throughout the day, and bask in the glory of our blue marble in real time.
Every 20 minutes (or every hour, you pick), Downlink updates your desktop background with the freshest images of Earth.
Choose from different views of Earth, from close ups of the tropics, to the continental US, to the absolutely stunning full disk images from geostationary satellites.
And you can even create your own views—zoom in close on where you live, pick your favorite hemisphere, or pick somewhere else beautiful!
Note: As new sources come online, they’ll be added to the app as fast as possible. As of yet, though, I haven’t been able to find an open and available data source for Europe and/or Africa with the image quality and refresh frequency needed. If and when one is available, it’ll be in the app.
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Works as advertised.
das_hans
Great image quality and service. It does work and doesnt seem to be to heavy on the resources either. now two problems I have with it. 1. the app only has 3 satelite sources, all are above America and the Pacific. No support for europe, africa, russia as well as cerntral and western asia as of yet. Hopefully there will be more sources in the future since I like this app but would like to have the data for where im actually am at that moment. 2. this is a small thing but the app disables the settings for background color and defaults to black, however the background of the full sphere images is more of a dark blue and as someone senistive to color its quite annoying to look at. that one is easier to fix I think.
Great execution
a3tacp
I love the app so far! Simple to use and excellent-quality photography. Having tried 24hr Wallpaper before, this is a much better implmentation of dynamic desktops than that solution (despite the limited focus of photography on this app). I only have one or two suggestions, in order of most to least desired:The ability to remove political borders (both intra- & inter-national). The satellite imagery is crisp and beautiful, but the borders add a jaggedness to the images and especially interfere with the views of coastlines. I also echo the requests of other reviewers, such as the ability to move forward and backward in time as a neat little widget when you're bored. You could drag a time slider or something, then press a button to revert back to real-time, 20-minute updates.
1-2 Features Away From Being What I Hoped It Was
GripOnReality
The full disk images are absolutely beautiful and take advantage of the Pro Display XDR or Macbook Pro's XDR Displays to look better than almost any wallpaper available in terms of detail and range. Sadly, there are two missing features and one glitchy interaction w/Mac OS that prevent me from wanting to look elsewhere. In an ideal world, you'd be able to have different views on different desktop spaces, and/or be able to turn it off on different desktops. When you disable it on one monitor, that monitor seems to fight MacOS for wallpaper supremacy, and whatever you set will default back to the Monterey default wallpaper on every reboot, requiring you reconfigure your wallpaper again on a per desktop space basis. Would love to see the following features added:- Multi-monitor span as a setting, such that one can have differentiation across monitors. Doubly cool if it used the system monitor placement and resolutions to choose how to carve up the image and place to look continuous and remain at proper ppi. - Options on a per-desktop/space basis to enable different desktop wallpapers based on spaces for people who use the wallpaper to help differentiate which workflow they are working on.- Figuring out the buggy interaction b/t MacOS and Downlink that causes the turf battle over user selected wallpapers when ignore this display is chosen in settings. Otherwise, I really like where this is going and the ability to finally find a source of wallpapers that take advantage of a high ppi monitor as well as Apple's dynamic Catalina wallpaper. Much more the manner in which it serves as low-key clock and pale-blue-dot reminder.
Truly neat; a few rough edges
Aichon
What a neat app! Super simple to use with a great UI. It'd get five stars from me, if not for these quibbles:1) I only want it to appear on a monitor of my choosing, rather than all connected monitors.2) The default aspect ratio results in the logo being partially cropped on a 1080p monitor.Relatedly, the aspect ratio seems to be affected by System Preferences' Fill Screen/Fit to Screen/Stretch to Fill Screen setting for Desktop Background (and I can set different monitors to use my preferred backgrounds as well), but all of those changes get reverted after a minute or two. If they didn't get reverted, this would be a 5-star app for me.
Developer Response
Thanks for the feedback! Multi-monitor support coming soon, as is something that should address your aspect ratio concerns.
- New app icon.
- Recompiled for better support on the latest versions of macOS.
Version 2.7
The developer, Colangelo Studios, LLC, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
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Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More