One of two atlas apps offered by National
Geographic, World Atlas HD delivers the world to your device. Of the two (the
other is The World by National Geographic), this is the most popular and, for a
couple of reasons, it’s easy to see why though some aspects are less than
perfect.
Upon opening, users are presented with an
excellently rendered globe in portrait or landscape view that can spin and
rotate with the touch of a finger. There are three looks, Executive ciew,
Classic, and Satellite. Double tapping and pinching allows you to zoom in or
out and moving your finger in any direction scrolls to a new part of the map.
If there is a Wi-Fi or cellular connection,
you can zoom in as much as you like, all the way to road maps provided by Bing.
Google Maps would have been much better but Bing is growing. If offline, you
can only tap a few times before you get to a blank screen that you need to zoom
out of to get back to your previous screen or area. The reason for this is to
keep the app size down and users are encouraged to download maps and satellite
views for offline use. It’s not ideal but the core idea is clever to at least
save on file size.
World Atlas HD allows users to drop pins on
the maps but you can’t go pin crazy. It’s only available for your current
location and the capital cities around the world. Tapping and holding as you
would in the built in maps app doesn’t allow you to place pins but it does call
up a pop-up with useful information about the country you’ve tapped.
Bing Maps, the offline zoom and placing
pins aren’t spectacular, but one of the best features is the distance scale bar
in the upper left corner. Tapping and holding this turns it into a purple
direction line what you can a fairly accurate idea of the distance between the
two locations, which is great for travel plans.
World Atlas HD is by no means perfect but
the panning around and zooming is smooth, even if the app needs to redraw your
view from time to time during the zoom. It happens quickly but it’s not seamless.
There is a lot of potential here and some clever ideas that could be expanded
upon, but it’s a good app and it’s clear that soon the role of an atlas and its
feature set will dramatically change. Given that, it’s already it’s a long way
from dog eared pages in a hand me down text book.
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Details
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Compatible with
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iPad
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Requires
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iOS 3.2 or later
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Price
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$ 1.99
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Category
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Reference
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Updated
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Sep 09, 2011
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Version
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2.2
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Size
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67.6 MB
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Seller
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National Geographic Society
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