S&T SkyWeek Reviews – Page 5
2/5 rating based on 50 reviews. Read all reviews for S&T SkyWeek for iPhone.
S&T SkyWeek is free iOS app published by American Astronomical Society (inc)
Please fix view!!!!
Mcewanja
When are you going to fix the view which is permanently in portrait view? It used to be in landscape mode which made it easy to use. Now I have to crane my neck sideways or manually hold my iPad in portrait mode to read Sky Week. Also only the refresh and night view buttons can be used. The others are grayed out. I can't even get to home. Come on...fix these really annoying bugs!!!! What's the hold up?
I use this app 5 to 7 days a week
Ki6H .
The pure pleasure of looking at the night sky is the point of this app (and of amateur astronomy.) It's terrific for naked eye astronomy and for binocular viewing, too. They tip you off to seasonal formations, planetary conjunctions, asterisms, comets (when they're easily visible), meteor showers, etc. The writing is warm, accessible, informative & brief. The diagrams, very useful. This free version is just as good as the pay one (the difference is the pay version will link to your calendar.) Especially for a beginner or intermediate amateur astronomer, this helps make looking at the night sky a fun thing to do and share with friends.
Solid, but has one major problem and one minor one...
AstroPaul
SkyWeek provides good info on what's up in a given week. Each entry also links to a quick star chart view (provided by a built-in, mini version of Sky Safari). The old problems, though, are still not fixed! (See what follows for details.) And, there's a new issue: Pop up iOS error message! "SkyWeek May Slow Down Your iPod" "The developer of this app needs to update it to improve its compatibility." OK, developers, are you listening?! :-) Sadly, the app has been ignored entirely by its developers for more than three years! The last update was in November 28 of 2013!! -------------------------- ISSUES As with so many apps, they're expecting you to hold the iPhone up to your eyeball! While there is pinch zooming of the text, there is NO text reflow. Hence, you're stuck scrolling back and forth if you want to read the entries from a comfortable distance. They should provide choices of font sizes, along with reflowing text. What's more, some stories or entries link to the Sky & Telescope magazine itself. If you're a subscriber, a nifty window pops up with the magazine. Here's where there's good news and bad. There are excellent navigational tools-- in fact, more than are provided in the actual Newstand S & T subscription that I paid for!! They include searching for specific text and jumping to particular pages. That's where the bad news comes in... searching brings up the spinning wheel, which just keeps going and going and never getting anywhere. Then, the option to jump to a Page is poorly designed. There's a button labelled that, but no matter how hard you try, it doesn't work! Right below it is what looks to be another button labelled "Intro". Who would ever have thought that you were supposed to tap the Intro button to clear it, so you can enter a page number. All visual cues are wrong here and the app developer needs to go back to Apple school. The Jump to a Page button isn't even a button! Now, in the awkward news category, you have to re-enter your e-mail address and password for the magazine, even if you already have it on your iPhone. (That must be the much vaunted lack of inter-app communication in the i-device realm.) Finally, not sure what all the hoopla is about the Night Mode... the events and things to observe are naked eye ones, for which dark adaptation is truly unnecessary. In any event, it's there for what it's worth! Nevertheless, none of these problems are deal breakers, and the app is definitely worth downloading. I've rated it 4 stars. I'll up it to 5 if they ever fix the text resizing biz. --------------------------- Note: the app is really unnecessary if you have Sky Safari. SS has this built into it. In fact, I'll make a recommendation for Sky Safari on all sorts of grounds! See reviews.
Poor
JF229
Updated to latest, is not updating text for current week. 'Stuck' on week ending Aug 19. App was useless while I was viewing eclipse. There does not seem to be any common UI controls such as 'About'. It shows location as text "current location". So how do I know it is correctly set?
Fantastic weekly sky events app, with minor flaws
Vasska
I love checking this app every now and then to see what's "up." There are usually several events listed, from purely naked eye to occasional small telescope challenges. But the real gem is the sky chart that opens when you tap an event. Yes, it shows you the selected event at your location. But you can go backwards and forwards in time (in any step from seconds, minutes, hours, etc) - great for occultations! But it gets better: pinch and zoom can take you from the whole sky to maybe 5 arcsec or less! Again, great for timing occultations, and also for seeing planet discs. Lots of Messier and other common objects are marked and appear if you zoom sufficiently (but most are not graphically displayed - this isn't Celestia). So what's missing? My biggest gripe is that the week's events are followed by a text description of the planets, but I would really like a link to the planet in the sky chart, especially when hunting for Uranus and Neptune. I'd also like to see major moons. Once I saw it depict Galilean shadows on Jupiter but not the actual moons. I'm not sure if the shadows are a regular thing or just s special event. Last, the weekly list updates all at once, on Sunday I believe. I would love to see more upcoming events, as I have missed some I'd have liked to see because I did not check in time. I know the paid version lets you add events to your calendar, but this must be done manually.