Whether it’s pointing your phone at the sky to identify a plane with FlightRadar24 or looking at the constellations in the night sky with recent App Deal of the Week entrant Sky Walk 2 there’s been a lot of apps ready to show you what’s in the sky above. One of the original apps to do so was Google’s Sky Map, but it was long ago presumed dead, left languishing without updates for years – but no more. Google has sent out an update to the app, fixing some of the issues.
The update isn’t complete, its still pretty well mired in Gingerbread design, it’s more Holo than Material Design, but it has been updated, so there’s hope that we could see some better design in the long run.
The list of features updated isn’t long, but there’s some fixes in there, especially data based fixes which we all like:
Twice as many stars! (Down to magnitude 5.6)
Fixed some data errors (e.g. misnamed Rigil Kentaurus)
Made the menu accessible in the action bar
Corrected planet order so that Jupiter appears behind Venus.
Added Arabic translations (thanks to xsoh on github)
Minor bugfixes.
Sky Map is one of the first apps I used on Android, though Google open sourced the app and handed it over to Carnegie Melon University to handle the updates – but that plan obviously failed with this update the first since 2012. If you haven’t tried out Sky Map, you can download it for Free from Google Play right now. Head over and check it out.
Zombie app! Back from the dead!!
And I went and bought Skywalk2 6 months ago…
On my 5X it is now called Google Sky Map – again. On my Nexus 7 it is just called Sky Map.
Sky map was useless on my LG G3 as the display bounced around so much with hand movement that you could not read the display. With my Nexus 5X it is much better. There is now a yellow horizon line that is good for aligning the phone properly. Maybe it was always there and I did not notice. I used it last night to identify Jupiter rising just after sunset.