A Magnificent Failure, Improved
If you want to watch sats fly overhead, this app will not allow you to be easily alerted to a nights worth. If you only want to watch the orbits of a particular satellite, such as the ISS, this app can help at its current stage of development.
Version 1.1 advances the programming, yet is still based on selecting individual satellites. It is impossibly tedious to prepare an entire nights viewing, because one must select dozens of individual sats and each of their many individual appearances during the course of the night, and then set notifications for each. The apps slow response worsens the problem. It needs a one, or few, tap method to say, "Alert me to all the sats that will be visible tonight at this location, between these hours." Or, follow the model of GoSatWatch, which simply posts alerts to every rising sat meeting criteria for location and brightness until told to stop.
The pick list for manual locations includes not a single town in my state! Much better to allow locations to be picked from Google Maps. Fortunately, it is possible to enter lat/long coordinates instead, so at least the app is finally useable through a convoluted method.
Im still not worried. These are the best programmers on iOS. Theyll get it right, and when they do, this sat tracker will be more sophisticated and flexible than anything else available. The problem seems to be that the underlying guts, borrowed from SkySafari, were never intended to find batches of rising objects, and all the nifty new features were intended for tracking the SkyCube mission. It makes sense to extend that to tracking any single satellite, but batch processing of groups of sats still needs to be worked into the patch.
Prior review:
A Magnificent Failure * *
This app was designed to track the future SkyCube mission, and will be excellent for that. The trouble is that tacking on the ability to fly along with other named satellites is not the same as being able to find a set of otherwise unknown sats to see. A reasonable buy anyway, in the hope that it may be upgraded.
Satellite Safari leverages the code base of SkySafari and is exquisite eye candy, but its useless for tracking satellites. No one knows whats flying overhead, so there is no point requesting sats by name, individually, to discover when they may become visible. The app needs, instead, to tell us what we could see, specifying when and where to look.
A proper satellite tracker creates a list of all the sats to be seen that night, based on user-defined settings for magnitude and elevation (or an algorithm for the number of sats to be seen), and then alerts the user to pending passes while mapping the fly-over. To compare how a satellite tracker should work, try GoSatWatch. It will be obvious that Satellite Safari potentially excels at the mapping, but lacks in all other regards.
iPod owners and anyone who may, someday, be out of range of WiFi and cellular, or anyone who wants to plan observations for a site other than wherever they are at the moment -- you are unwelcome here. There are no provisions for manually creating and storing locations. Depending solely upon Location Services is always sloppy. My WiFi does not locate my iPod, so Satellite Safari thinks Im at the location N 0°0" E 0°0" which I most certainly am not. So, even if the software were designed to be useful, it could not predict any fly-overs for my location!
Much of the information detailing specific satellites is out of date. The International Space Station is described "...as of November, 1998," looking ahead to what are now the long-past milestones planned for what were, back then, future years.
Im amused, not worried. Southern Stars are great programmers. Theyll fix this.
Bozocity about Satellite Safari, v1.1
