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Gadget Crave

There’s an App for That: NASA for iPhone Review

by Tana Lawley – Lester B. Pearson High School, Calgary AB Jan 26, 2010

5 stars

App: NASA app for iPhone
Developer: NASA
Size: 1.4 MB
Price: FREE

Imagine having thousands of different images, videos and news updates from NASA in the palm of your hand. For the low price of “free,” you now have that opportunity!

NASA’s first ever iPhone and iPod Touch app offers over 1,300 NASA spaceflight images and over 5,200 Astronomy Pictures of the Day, more than 50 videos and hundreds of NASA Twitter feeds and mission updates. It also has a list of current and past missions, descriptions and pictures from the missions and a schedule of upcoming launches. If you like a picture, you can save it to your photos folder on your iPhone or iPod Touch. You can even search for specific pictures or videos, and use a filter to decide what missions, videos, or updates you want to see.

At first, this app looks like a dream come true for space-loving kids and adults alike, but a closer look reveals a couple of problems. First, you can’t view anything in landscape mode, which gets irritating since most of the pictures are clearly meant to be viewed landscape. You can, however, save them to your photo album, where they can then be viewed landscape. Second, it would be nice if the app made use of push notifications (the small red numbers in the corner of some apps like Mail or the App Store when you have updates) to show when new mission updates are available to read.

Despite these issues, this app is absolutely essential for anyone even remotely interested in space or space travel.

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Correction

Submitted by TanaL1993 on Thu, 01/28/2010 - 01:40.

In a recent update, NASA included the ability to view pictures in landscape mode.

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