We released version 2 of SkyMap for Windows Phone.
There are a lot of changes in the new version. The application has a completely new map rendering. It uses XNA, taking advantage of the phone’s GPU. All drawings are performed frame by frame, in real time.
Another big difference is the way the application calculates the position of sky objects. I moved from trigonometric formulae to matrix computations. XNA drawing approach is conceptual different compared to the standard Silverlight 2D drawing. Drawing in XNA uses concepts like camera, universe, view, etc… And for that reason, I had to change the application quite a bit. Actually, I can say we completely rewrote the application, reusing only the settings “fluff” from the old one: buttons, ui bars, settings pages, etc.
I really hope that our users will like and appreciate the changes.
And we rewrote the application description and created a new video presentation. But unfortunatelly, there was a glitch in the release process because we found a bug in the calibration dialog. We fixed the bug and started a new release (version 2.1).
Tis our new presentation video:
SkyMap is an amazing planetarium for your windows phone. It enables you to point your phone at the sky and see what stars, constellations, planets or deep space objects are out there in real time.
SkyMap shows the sky in 3D, like you see it at night time exposing a collection of over 110000 stars. It’s very easy to use for any viewpoint, time and location on Earth: it determines your location automatically, supports pinch to zoom for more details and provides a highly customizable map.
Ciprian Boboc 