Cool Thing #4 – iPod Touch | Fig Jam and Lime Cordial

Cool Thing #4 – iPod Touch

April 21, 2009 by Celia @ Fig Jam and Lime Cordial

I bought myself an iPod Touch for Christmas and am completely besotted with it. It makes me feel like I live in the future. When I was a little girl, I remember watching the original Star Trek series and thinking how wonderful it would be if doors really could open by themselves. Now I have an eight gigabyte micro-computer in my pocket, which allows me to do everything from reading novels without ever turning a page, to playing seriously cool touchscreen games, to listening to music and watching movies.

Our favourite application (“app”) is Star Walk. It cost $5.99 and provides us with an interactive star chart of wherever we are, enables us to watch the movement of objects through the sky with a “time machine” function (which also plots the phases of the moon), allows us to zoom in on stars, constellations, Messier objects and planets, while providing details on them in a Star Wars style pop-up menu, and much more. With it, we’ve been able to figure out when objects will be visible in the night sky and plan our skywatching accordingly. And it’s very user friendly – Small Man recently announced that he’d calculated (sic) when the next full moon would be. Here’s a YouTube clip of the app in action:

. . . . .

iPod Touch – $329

Star Walk App – $5.99

Feeling like Captain Janeway on the Starship Voyager?

Priceless.

Posted in Cool Things | Tagged iPod Touch, Star Walk app | 10 Comments

10 Responses

on April 21, 2009 at 1:16 pm Erika

Hi, I am really glad you are enjoying our app and I want to thank you for the great review – love the ‘Feeling like Captain Janeway on the Starship Voyager? Priceless’. I would like to add a couple of points: price is $4.99 on appstore…isn’t it? And also, here is a scoop, new version is coming out soon, now under revision, and it has major great updates for all of the Captain Janeways out there. So I hope you will enjoy it even more!
on April 21, 2009 at 1:18 pm figjamandlimecordial

Wow, Erika, this is your app? It is seriously wonderful – thank you. It’s $5.99 here in Australia – currency exchange – our dollar is only about 70c to the USD. Really looking forward to the new version, though I can’t see how we could enjoy it any more… :)
on April 21, 2009 at 1:37 pm Tim

My favorite post so far! and the developer found it!!! That’s so cool. My only suggestion is to change the picture to a current generation iPod touch. Just saying… Haha

More Apple posts please :)
on April 21, 2009 at 2:00 pm figjamandlimecordial

Is that better, Tim? :)
- on July 18, 2009 at 8:23 pm TimA
  
  Yarb, much better!
on April 21, 2009 at 2:36 pm Erika

ops…price is correct $5.99 for Australia….didn’t know about your precise location. Sorry about it…still worth buying it though :o)
- on April 21, 2009 at 3:06 pm figjamandlimecordial
  
  An absolute steal at that price, Erika! We got the big Dobsonian out the other day, and easily found Saturn using Star Walk to help us pinpoint the exact spot in the sky to look at. The $5.99 we spent on Star Walk has made the $600 telescope infinitely more user-friendly.
on April 21, 2009 at 4:24 pm Erika

…and the new updates come free if you already have the app!
on May 9, 2010 at 4:06 am peter bryenton

In the palms of our hands, yes. In the late ’50s my dad’s computer occupied a two-storey building and took teams of technicians to feed it punched cards. One Christmas it played us a Carol tune after a week of programming & debugging!
- on May 9, 2010 at 7:30 am Celia @ Fig Jam and Lime Cordial
  
  It never fails to astonish me how fast technology is developing, although every time I say that, my kids tell me I’m showing my age…sigh… :)