A blog for discussing all things AstroPlanner-related
Well, it’s done. AstroAid is now available in the App Store for the princely sum of $0.99 (of which I will see about $0.69 a download).
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/astroaid/id541448395?ls=1&mt=8
Feel free to support the further improvement of this and other apps by downloading it. Or not.
After a day of rampant manual deforestation of the upper reaches of my skull, I have finally managed to get AstroAid uploaded to the Apple App Store, where it is now “Waiting for review”. Huzzah! Hopefully I won’t have to wait long to find out how I screwed up, and what I have to do to be loved by the reviewers. Seeing this is my first App Store app, I’m fully expecting them to be unhappy about many things. But the app is fairly straightforward and doesn’t make use of any fancy features, so mebbe I’ll get lucky.
I was trying two apps that are roughly equivalent to AstroAid, and one of them plain does not work. How that managed to get into the store is beyond me. The other one is full of typos (I can only imagine that the author is not a native English-speaker).
Fingers crossed.
I previously posted about AstroAid, my first “commercial” iOS app for the iPhone. Now I have completed the iPad part of things. Conveniently, you can get a bunch more stuff on screen compared to the iPhone. Some pictures…
A frequently-requested AstroPlanner feature is some kind of indication as to when the best time to observe a particular object would be. This would take into account many values, such as the altitude of the object, the phase of the moon, whether the moon is up, and how far from the moon the object is, etc. Enter the Observability value for an object.
I am working on a new iOS app (and my first “real” app on that platform) called AstroAid. I’m using this app to get some practice developing iOS apps, and to discover how to do many things, like creating a universal app (running on both iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad) and publishing it via the Apple App Store (many hoops to jump through). While app is relatively simple, it’s not trivial, and I believe will be of some use to amateur astronomers.
If you look at the object list in AstroPlanner, you will see a whole bunch of properties associated with those objects. Some of those properties remain constant over time (for non-solar-system objects, e.g. Magnitudes, RA/Dec coordinates, etc.), while other properties vary with the passage of time (e.g. Altitude, hour angle, parallactic angle, etc.).Â
It’s difficult to see how these latter properties change over, say, the course of an observing session. For some purposes, especially if you’re an astroimager, it’s important to know what those changes are. Enter a new feature to help with this kind of visualisation.
Let’s start with some minor changes for V2.1 – more columns in the object list.
OK, I’m not a very regular blogger (mainly because I don’t blog about non-boring things), but I intend to try to post more in the coming days. These postings will typically be about two different, and yet connected subjects: AstroPlanner software development and iOS (iPhone/iPad) software development.
The passing of Steve Jobs yesterday had more of an effect on me than I would have expected. Although he was not (apparently) the easiest of people to work for, he was a driven perfectionist with a unique talent for exquisitely Zen-like design and marketing. While he was just the visible part of Apple (on and off) for many years, his influence was and is unmistakable.
For some reason I get the urge to write about the rise, fall, and triumph of Apple, all of which happened on my watch, in terms of my own experiences over the years.
AstroPlanner V2 has been released. Finally.