ZarkSeven

Appy Monday space fans!  Last week when the Ares 1-X rocket launched, my brother asked me if I had the NASA app.  It somehow slipped under my radar.  So I downloaded it to see if it had the right stuff.

Premise

The NASA app is an all-purpose news and information app for NASA activities.  There are 4 main sections: Missions, Images, Videos, and Updates.  In missions, you can see news and information dealing with all NASA-related missions to the Moon, Mars, the International Space Station, the Space Shuttle, the Solar System, and the Universe, as well as those relating to lil’ ol’ planet Earth.  Tap on a mission and you can see a myriad of information about it.  For instance, the Hubble Space Telescope area will show you its current location over the Earth, an RSS feed of Hubble stories, Hubble-related images such as recent pictures it has taken, repair missions, and forth, videos from NASA television and a clock telling how long it’s been in orbit (7141 days – holy crap that long!)

The Images section shows you NASA Images of the Day (IOTD), as well as the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) that I featured a little over a year ago.  As of today, you can view 1337 NADA IOTD’s and 5242 APOD’s.  You can get a description of each image, can save it to your camera roll, or even email it.

The Videos section has video feeds from NASA Television (by default) as well as video segments from Ares TV, Chandra X-Ray Observatory, Little SDO HMI, NASA eClips, NASA Explorer, NASA Hallmarks, , NASA Kennedy Videos, NASAconnect, NASASciFiles, and ReelNASA.  Tapping your video choice brings up a page with a description and video thumbnail.  You can tap the thumbnail to pull up and stream the full-sized video.  You can also email links to it.

Lastly the Updates section is an RRS feed area that can pull from over 20 sources, putting all updated news items into one folder area.

Presentation

The graphics are crisp and sharp.  One thing that NASA really has to do as an organization is provide beautiful images and artist renderings of its programs.  An instrument cruising through space towards a destination really isn’t all that interesting, so providing visual representations of what has happened and what’s going to happen really helps them connect to the public, and in this the app doesn’t disappoint.  Things such as the mission selection screen even have gorgeous images rather than a boring text list.

All of the video I saw were links to YouTube videos.  You could say “well I could just go to YouTube and watch them” which is true, but it’s the wrapper that makes the difference, and the app does a nice job of sectioning off videos into various missions, and providing a nice brief description of each.  As you would expect, the video aspect worked flawlessly and looked and sounded good.

Interface

By and large, the interface is very easy to understand and browse through.  I like how you can either view things in the context of missions, or you can skip that and just look at current news feeds, images and videos.  Seems like some thought was put into how to best present information that can be very dry.  Standard iPhone / iPod Touch conventions are put to good use, and the app is very accessible.  It does rely very heavily on an internet connection to pull in new stories, download pictures, watch videos, etc, so it benefits from 3G or a good wi-fi connection.

Freshness

My first thoughts when I see an app like this is that it will be one of those apps that seemed like a good idea to someone, but is not really given much attention by the creators post-release.  While it was just released October 23rd and hasn’t had time for revisions or additions, the content in it appears to be updated rather frequently.  The RSS feeds used are quite active, and I’ve been surprised at the amount of video content available too, at least one per day.  You could check the app several times a day and see new stuff in it.

When you scroll through the list of missions, you start to realize just how many things NASA is involved with.  High profile projects like Hubble or the ISS tend to make the news sporadically when news happens, but I quite enjoyed scrolling down the list and going “oh yeah, what’s going on with that mission?” or “what the heck is that one?”.

Value

The app is free, and the merging of all the NASA and space-related information into one app makes it well worth downloading for people interested in the subject matter.  The frequent updates make it an app you want to check daily, and the content is nice and bite-sized, so you can keep up-to-date without getting bogged down by too much information.  It’s a nice, polished app for any space enthusiast.

Summary

Premise:  Great
Presentation:  Superlative
Interface:  Decent
Freshness:  Impressive
Value:  Above Average
Overall:  Great app