Downlink 4+

Real-time satellite imagery‪.‬

Colangelo Studios, LLC

    • 4.5 • 265 Ratings
    • Free

Screenshots

Description

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.

What’s New

Version 2.6

- Fixed a few caching issues that were preventing precomposed regional views from loading.

Ratings and Reviews

4.5 out of 5
265 Ratings

265 Ratings

a3tacp ,

Great execution

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.

JamesAstro ,

This is lovely!

This is a lovely app. I've used a handful of desktop picture apps over the years, and this is my favorite. Right now I'm using it to keep tabs on smoke from the California fires.

I have one suggestion though: When the app is setup to launch at startup, it always opens the window, and there doesn't seem to be a way to disable that. This means the window pops down from the menu bar every time my Mac starts. Other than that, this app is pretty close to perfect.

das_hans ,

Works as advertised.

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.

App Privacy

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.

Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More