The National Geographic Society
may be best known for its iconic
yellow National Geographic
magazine, which very often
includes, folded up inside, some
awesome maps from all around the world. As a youngster, I
remember pouring over National
Geographic maps on the living
room floor, hanging a map of
North America on my bedroom
wall, and using them as study aids in school. So far, National Geographic
Society has been a prolific app
creator, producing 19 apps for
the iPhone and 16 for the iPad.
The latest: The World by National
Geographic. It's a $3.99 app for the iPad only. Taking the World for a Spin The World app uses National
Geographic maps from around
the world to form the
foundation for the app, but the
organizing principle is a globe
that you can rotate in any direction and zoom into via
intuitive pinch, expand and
rotate two-finger touches. As
you zoom, you'll see yellow round
balls that indicate there is a
more focused area map to explore. For example, as you
zoom into a Northwestern U.S.
map, there's a ball for a more
detailed Puget Sound map. Tap
it, and you'll launch into that
map. Visually, the maps sort of appear
to wrap around the globe
representing their basic position
on Earth. As you zoom in, they
become more flat, of course, like
paper maps. In addition to the mesmerizing
rotating globe navigation
system, you can find or browse
the maps by regional thumbnails.
Additionally, if you want to find a
particular nation of the world, some of which can be quite small
and hard to find when you're
feeling geographically dumb, you
can browse alphabetically and
tap on the country's flag when
you find what you want. When you tap a nation, the app
will take you to a map of that
nation, zoomed into it from
within a larger map of the
region. To the right, the app
provides a list of basic facts about the country, including
things like population,
government type, capital,
average life expectancy,
currency and the like. The nation details include some
elegant photos from National
Geographic and My Shot Community photographers -- the quality is fantastic, but there's
not many photos for each
country. I found the polar regions
particularly interesting, mostly
because I rarely see polar maps,
particularly that show good
relation to the rest of the Earth.
Of course, it's not often that I have a need to venture to the
Arctic, virtually or in person. Not surprisingly, the app also
lets you share map views via
email, Facebook or Twitter. Minor Quibbles It should be noted that this app
is mostly useless when you don't
have an Internet connection. It
seems as if some very basic
maps are available when offline,
but it usually takes very little zooming to end up with a bunch
of blue circles of nothing, along
with a pop-up warning box that
says you need a network
connection for full functionality. It should also be noted that this
app is more about paper maps
as applied to an app than
something like Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Earth. So, for example,
while you can zoom into satellite
pictures deeply into your
backyard in Google Earth, you'll
quickly run out of zoom as you
dive into the "maps" in The World app. On my initial use, I expected
to be able to zoom in pretty
much indefinitely, even though
the app never promised that
feature. Still, there's something
to be said for old-school map interfaces -- all the major
information is usually always
easily visible. All-in-all, this is an excellent app.
You can certainly get lost
exploring the world through this
app, but overall I expect, after
my initial rundown of the world,
to come back to it as a fast and easy geographic reference tool.
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