After rocking our socks off with the National Parks app early last year, National Geographic has released their second app on the App Store, this time focusing on guides for some of the world’s most popular tourist cities. The National Parks app, which was developed by the talented bunch at Rally Interactive, was content-rich and particularly spectacular at its animations & transitions. Overall, it felt like a really awesome & polished app, even making it to our list of Best of 2012: UI Animations as well as our Editor’s Choice of 2012. Rally Interactive has added the same level of animations, transitions, polish and feel to City Guides by National Geographic as well.
City Guides aims to be your goto app for practically any relevant information about a particular city. The app currently features London, New York, Paris & Rome and contains extensive information about the weather, local eateries & joints, must-visit places, amazing photographs and other tourist info along with a special “Did you know” section and an “Essentials” section giving you stats aboout the city, conversion tools, news sources, etc. I especially loved the transitions as you swipe between the four cities. Each city is displayed as a card with a beautiful photo as well as the count of each type of information available for that city in the guide. The menu for categories of information is available below each city as a grid. Through this menu, you can peruse through the abundance of information available for each city. The app makes it easy to mark something as favorite so that it’s easily available via a special menu item. The photos in the gallery are truly breathtaking.
All extensive information available in the app is excellently complimented by the UX that the app offers. There are tons of litte things, special touches, tiny details all over the app. The transitions between views are worth a special mention. Unfortunately, the app only ships with guides for four cites — London, Paris, New York and Rome and we’re hoping that more cities will be added to the app soon. Moreover, unlike National Parks, City Guides is only available for the iPhone. You can grab the app Free from the App Store, although some information in each city’s guide is locked. You can unlock the full guide via IAP for $4.99 each or $12.99 for all four cities.