Saturday, April 03, 2010

iPad and the Planets

It's a good time for the tech-head, with the Apple iPad out in the US and oh so anticipated here in blightly land.

So it's probably not a coincidence that today there was a whole host of new releases of iPhone apps, including the Navionics charts. Must admit am really looking forward to seeing what they look like on the iPad - proper size charts for a reasonable price.

Alas my iPhone is completely full - it's the 16 GB 3G version and just out of contract but think it might be worth waiting till June/July to get the next version. The buzz on the tech blogs is "HD" - better screen and camera, but for me I'm hoping there'll be a 64 GB version.

So at the moment spending my time deleting apps, which makes reviewing the V4 Navionics impossible. But one that stayed in was the Planets app, which shows the location of the planets in the sky wrt the main constellations, as in the screen-shot above.

And it's been very useful in weeks passed to spot Mars and last night Venus & Mercury (see above for their positions at 8pm BST in London), so big thumbs up here.

No doubt there are others in the increasingly hard to navigate Apple Store, and again these are the sorts of app that would be wonderful on the iPad.

Update: Yes! "Planets" is an iPad app so no doubt it will look just great on that big screen.

2 comments:

Eau Gazeuse said...

What's the name of that sky app ? Any other you'd recommend?

JP said...

It's called simply "Planets" and *newsflash* it can run iPad native!!

I might do another iPhone app post when get something which I can actually load them on!