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WorldViewPosted in Travel on 19 Oct 2008 |
 Reviewed by Steve Litchfield |
  (15 votes, average: 4.07 out of 5)  Loading ... |
Editor’s rating:  
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There’s a fascination about webcams that is hard to beat. Being able to open a window in ‘near real time’ into other spots across the planet and see what the weather’s doing, what people are up to, what the traffic’s like, and so forth, is addictive and also a great talking point around the home or office. Check how bad the weather is in London or see the dawn over New York.
WorldView is a consummately polished interface onto a public directory of worldwide webcams. Each image is cached on the webcams.travel servers, to ensure against broken images on the original webcams
themselves, but updates are still fairly recent, from 15 minutes to a handful of hours.
Although WorldView doesn’t remember its state between sessions, it does have a nifty ‘Bookmarks’ system, so that you can
mark the webcams you’re most interested in and then step through their images in slide-show form. At each point in the interface, the last image captured is shown as a thumbnail and there’s an iPhone icon to drill down into a details screen, offering the chance to save the photo or to open a preview of the appropriate webcams.travel directory entry. This last is important as you can then click through in Safari to the originating page of the webcam image, often discovering extra images, animations and even videos of the location in question.
Of special interest is that WorldView asks if it can use your current location and then presents webcams sorted by distance – there’s almost certain to be one or more from your local major town or beauty spot. You can also search by place name, bringing up stunning images, taken automatically in the last hour or so, of your chosen location.
The adherence of WorldView to the iPhone ’style guide’ is very gratifying. For example, when viewing an image, you can rotate your iPhone sideways and the image rotates and expands to fill the new, landscape display. And then tapping the display gives you the option to show the webcam’s position using Google Maps data, among other options. At each stage, the details pages and options menus hold no nasty surprises. The software’s even clever enough to know not to rotate the screen when you bring up a webcam that presents ‘portrait’ aspect photos.
In case you’re completely out of ideas as to what webcams and locations to browse, a ‘Featured’ tab presents lists of ‘New’ (newly added cams), ‘Recent’ (those with recently updated images) and ‘Popular’, each fascinating to flick through and then bring up on screen.
WorldView is slick, free and set to become a lot of people’s favourite iPhone application.
