Planetary is a new free app for iPad that’s soaring up the free apps chart in the iOS Store, and with good reason: it’s pretty amazing.
The app looks at your iPad’s on board music collection and re-imagines it as a galaxy of stars.
Each star is an artist; tap to zoom closer and you’ll see orbiting planets, one for each album. Tap one of those and you’ll see moons, each representing a track on that album.
The visuals are gorgeous. Artist-stars flare and roar, sending out plumes of star-stuff into space. Album-planets are vast Jupiter-esque gas giants, their surface textures based on a warped distortion of the original cover art. If you manoeuvre things around in the right way, you can generate your own spectacular eclipses, like the one I created while listening to some Throwing Muses (above).
Planetary isn’t a replacement for iTunes, and isn’t intended to be. There’s no search function, for example, and no support for playlists yet, but it’s free and it’s great fun to play around with. It’s one of those apps that you’ll be showing to non-iPad owners for months to come.
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Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer in England. He also writes for the Press Association and The Morning News. You can find out more at his website, and follow him on Twitter @gilest.
