NASA Visualization Explorer is a free iPad application which serves as a visualization explorer or in other words a news reader that covers exclusive stories on advanced space-based researches conducted by NASA. The application carries news about out of the world happenings in a beautiful manner with images and text. Also, some stories carry the videos as well. If you are interested in Astronomy, then this application is a heaven for you.
The application easily marks your read and unread news so that you don’t miss any even by chance. The application also carries minimal gestures which make it easy to use and keep it simple as well.
Use:
Swipe right to read the next story and swipe left to read the previous. Yes, it is as easy as it sounds. The application has nothing more complex to offer. There are four buttons in the bottom one of which saves your story for offline viewing, the other adds story to your favorites list. Apart from this you can also create custom lists according to you own choice. For example, you are interested in Asteroids, you can make a custom list with that name, and save all the stories related to asteroids in one place. Of course there is an option for the social network sharing.
The stories are updated pretty regularly and have topics such as:
- Green Survival
- Heating Up
- Asteroid Approach
- The Big Chill
- Igniting Waste……and so on
Each story is highlighted with an image and headline alone. You have to tap the story and swipe up to read the news related to it. This will also bring up the media related to your story if any. It can be more images or videos. For example, in one of the stories, they showed NASA’s dawn spacecraft was zooming towards the second largest body (Vesta) in the asteroid belt. As soon as you open this story, you realize that images speak louder than words and even louder is the video. It is a total delight to watch an extra terrestrial body from this point of view. The 40 seconds large video surely takes you aback.
Extra Features:
- You can switch on the cellular data warning. Since the application has a lot of media including videos and images, it warns you when you are on cellular data so that you can connect to WiFi if available. Nothing fancy in that but it is good to see that someone cares. Also, this can be switched of from the settings if you don’t want a warning popping up every time you are on cellular data.
- The application adds a badge to the app icon which depicts the number of your unread stories. It is a handy feature if you are a regular user of this application and in case you aren’t, this can be easily turned off from the settings.
- All the stories can also be marked read at once if you don’t find them interesting and want to get rid of them.
Final Verdict:
Weather or not a astronomer, this application is a total fun to use. With cutting edge technology of NASA brought right on your device, things couldn’t have gone better. Also, its the big gun itself (NASA) who is the developer of this application. That adds another reason why NOT to miss this one.
Here is the link to check out this free iPad app NASA Visualization Explorer.
