As many of you probably heard, Apple released their iPhone SDK so developers could release native applications for the iPhone and distribute them via iTunes. This is a huge announcement and developers like myself are scrambling to get applications created for release.
iSkyGaze has thousands of people using it everyday. Because it is strictly a web based application, I am limited in the kinds of things I can do right now. The graphic content is kept down to a bare minimum so it works well over Edge, and I do not allow any database calls to keep my web hosting fees down. Also, although Javascript allows me to emulate the look and feel of the iPhone, it is not as smooth as a native application. For all these reasons I have decided to buy a Mac and develop a native iSkyGaze application. My plans right now are to call it iSkyGaze Plus. The existing iSkyGaze web application will remain up as long as people are using it.
I only plan on charging one or two bucks for iSkyGaze Plus, but I have lots of great features planned. Here are some of the things I am looking at:
- Lots of additional objects. With the iPhone doing the math calculations, I can do a lot more at once.
- Real-time position updating
- 3D view of planetary objects
- Logging feature so you can record your viewing observations
- A MUCH faster and more intuitive interface
- Dynamically generated star charts for locating objects
First step is to buy a Mac. :) I hope to do that very soon. My plan is to dual-boot Vista so I can also continue my Visual Studio development work. Although the development environment on Mac does not look quite as polished as Visual Studio, it is pretty good. From my perspective, having a knowledge of C# should make this pretty painless I just need to learn more about the Cocoa framework.
I will post updates on my progress! I will also continue to add 0bjects into iSkyGaze as the spring/summer months approach. My focus is adding objects that everyone can see and easily identify.
3 Responses:
Hi....just bookmarked your site into my iTouch. Thanks! Raven
Hi Raven. Glad to see you here. Thanks for visiting!
Hello August,
I currently live in Singapore (working for a Fortune-100) and am using iSkyGaze in my Ipod Touch (no IPhone here yet). Great app and as you said, it is limited to the bandwith. I am an Amateur Astronomer who used to be a heavy user of the Palm Pilot application called Star Pilot (and Night Sky); the link to the web page is at the end. Some of the features that alwasy amazed me from this piece of software are:
1) Planetarium View, which I think should be much better in the IPhone/Itouch. You can rotate it, etc.
2) I travel a lot, so everytime I went to a different location, I modified the coordinates ( Latitude/Longitude) and that's it, I had the sky in my palm again. There was a feature to store as many places as you needed.
3) Night view (normal) or Day view, the latter being a white screen with stars being showed as black dots.
I used Star Pilot to set up my Meade telescope (105-ETX).
As you also know, Palm Pilots are ancient technology compared to the IPhone/ITouch. Let me know if you would like to work together on this. I can certainly give you more details about me, I'd be excited to do it. Best regards,
Javier
http://www.star-pilot.com/sp/index.html
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