This year we went to MacWorld 2010. Though we didn’t have our own booth we were eager to show our new apps that are being developed by us. We met with Macworld, TUAW, MacTech, iPhoneLife, theiPhoneblog, 148Apps, Appletell, Slapapp and Appstruck journalists and bloggers. Luckily they were quite interested and Mike Schramm from TUAW wrote an article covering our novelties.
Apple is promoting iPhone as a great devise for outdoor recreation, provided you have several essential apps. This list includes a birdwatcher encyclopedia, app that shares a screenshot with your mapped location, a panorama image app, an advanced weather-checker, a rout-tracker, a couple apps for sailing, and of course Star Walk.
When you’ve completed the day’s dynamic activities, there’s some time for relaxing night-time leisure, such as stargazing, and this is when Apple advises to use our app as one of the best outdoor apps to have on your iPhone.
A friend, who is a professional hiker, said that his group uses Star Walk on their monthly full moon hike. Seems to be a well-thought selection, which helps you to feel the unity with space and nature. When you do, does anything else matter?
Here is a comparison of Star Walk and Distant Suns by one of our users – Dave.
Did you ever look up at the night sky and wonder what you were seeing? Well, with your 3GS iPhone and a stargazing app, it’s easy to find out. Not sure if this is something that you would enjoy – try Distant Suns (lite), available free at the Apps Store. This freebie will give you an idea of how fun and easy stargazing with the iPhone can be. But understand that this lite version only gives you one of the three pieces of the stargazing puzzle. It lacks the ability to point the phone at the sky and automatically slew the display to identify the objects in your field of view. Also, it doesn’t have the ability to move forward in time to show when the planet or other space object you want to see will be visible from your locale.
To get full functionality as well as a wealth of additional data, options, graphics and ‘wow factor’ – you need a full version. Two of the most popular iPhone stargazing apps are Distant Suns and Star Walk. They have pretty similar feature sets and astronomy databases. Both utilize the phone’s GPS, compass and accelerometers to allow you to hold the phone up to the sky and show you an annotated display of the piece of the universe you are looking at. Both have night vision modes, sound effects and constellation images. There are some differences: display and graphics – Star Walk wins this one with amazing graphics and slick time animation. User interface – Star Walk wins this one for simplicity and lack of clutter. Price – Star Walk wins this one too, $2.99 vs $6.99.
Star Walk or Distant Suns? Frankly you can’t go wrong with either application, but for my money, the nod clearly goes to Star Walk.
Also here are a few suggested improvements:
1. 1. Spend some effort on the instructions, meaning of symbols, etc. for a help page – I think a lot of non-technical folks won’t understand all you present.
2. 2. Make a Wiki instructions/faq page and provide a link to it from within the Star Walk help page.
3. 3. Make a ‘Take Me There’ function – when you search for an object on the info page and select it, put azimuth and elevation arrows on the screen to guide you in the right direction until the object is in view.
Note from the developers:
Thanks, Dave, for such a nice review and for your suggestions that seem to be quite interesting and worth adding.
We’d be more than happy to receive more reviews like that. Therefore, if you use one of Star Walk competitors like SkyVoyager, PocketUniverse, Planets, etc. and would like to compare it to Star Walk and give us some precious ideas on further improvements of Star Walk contact us (olya at vitotechnology dot com) for re-deem code, write a review and we’ll publish your review here on our blog, Facebook and twitter.
We’d be more than happy if you help us to win in these awards. Could you possibly follow these 3 links and press “Vote” button?
For the Best Educational App category
For the Best App for High School+ Kids category
For the Best Augmented Reality App category
In December we made a little survey among iPhone users to be able to target our users and future customers. Now we can state that we know our customers a bit more. Here what we learnt so far: