It is twenty years since I bought my first laptop. Or rather, notebook computer, as it spent almost all of its time on my study desk with the occasional foray into an AA Conference hall. It was small and light, and called the Edgecraft Chaplet; it was silvery-grey with an 80 Mb hard drive, four whole megabytes of RAM, a mono display and an enviable keyboard. It ran Windows 3.1 on Ms-Dos 5.0, and cost an eye-watering £1,496.95. On this loved little machine I worked for two years - at first with the Matrix DOS program Blue*Star, Mark Pottenger’s CCRS92 and Mark Lipson’s clever Capella - until in 1995 the new and ground-breaking Solar Fire for Windows shot to the top of my wish-list. By then grayscale was looking very ... grey; it was time to move on to the longed-for colour screen, and along came a Texas Instruments Travelmate with its lovely TFT display. On this the Solar Fire graphics came vividly alive, and I could run the high-end astronomy program Dance of the Planets night and day for months on end back to the first century BC, plotting asteroids with ever greater precision for the events of the Gospels.
In 1997 the Travelmate found a new owner; the proceeds helped to fund the purchase of a reconditioned IBM Thinkpad, a sturdy, classy black beast with a huge 1.4 Gb hard drive and 24 Mb of Ram. Even this cost over £1000! How times have changed. But after a year this was letting me down. In 1998 and 2000 two Pico laptops - the Sentinel and the Consul - successively took over, again at enormous expense; and in 2002/3 after selling the Chaplet, another small fortune procured a stunning Toshiba Satellite and the brilliant little Samsung Q20 both running Windows XP. I have only just let these two go, after ten years’ use. They will be reconditioned and sold on to people who need a decent machine for school or office use but haven’t too much spare cash. The HP Pavilion that replaced them was a Windows Vista laptop; this too has a new owner, and now we are up to date in 2013 with the powerful Asus N55S (and its gorgeous Bang & Olufsen speakers) on which I am typing.
My father had a policy of replacing his car every two years, and I did the same with computers for ten years while they were still so expensive that people were glad to buy a used machine in tip-top condition. But since the millennium technology and software have both advanced so rapidly that not only are these objects of desire far more affordable, but such is their power and reliability that they remain useful for many years. The one fly in the ointment is the operating system; Microsoft in particular will only support each version of Windows for a finite period - after which you are on your own and potentially vulnerable to cyber-attack or system failure. But if you stay resolutely away from the internet (admittedly difficult these days) and police all the software that enters via your optical, USB and SD drives, or else regularly update your software platform, there is no current reason why your favourite laptop shouldn’t still be working in another ten years time.
You will be unsurprised to learn that my favourite astrological software for laptop and desktop is still Esoteric Technologies’ Solar Fire Gold - now at version 8. There are many excellent programs out there, and each of us has his or her own taste and requirements. There really is something for everyone. You may prefer Matrix’ latest incarnations of Blue*Star or Win*Star, or Cosmic Patterns’ Kepler, Sirius and Pegasus, or Regulus Platinum, or Intrepid, or Janus, or ZET Geo, or Millennium, or AstroCalc. For the Mac, options include Astrograph Time Passages or TimeCycles’ Io; for Vedic astrologers, Parasara’s Light. There is free software out there too (untried by me) - all the modules of Allen Edwall’s AstroWin can be downloaded online; and of course for data, nativities and discussion, online and on disk, dear departed Lois Rodden’s incomparable AstroDataBank.
Which brings us to the real focus of this article - astrology that is truly mobile. Because Allen Edwall also offers a tiny free program called Transits for the Android and Kindle platforms. He says: “Transits allows the user to check his individual planetary influences for any day past or present. A person's "general weather" forecast can be retrieved for any day, at any time. Transits is much more complete than any daily horoscope program as it is tailored to your specific birth date and time. Use Transits to learn more about how planetary energies influence you so that you can take steps to better "weather" anything that life throws at you. Astrology is the best tool for self-development and this program is real astrology.” This is not a full astrology program, but has had some very favourable reviews. Well, I have just tried it on the Samsung Galaxy Note 2, and can’t say I’m very impressed. First of all it is very tricky getting the input data to ‘stick’ - I had completely wrong dates and times until I stopped writing in the data boxes and just used the + and - function. Then the interpretations of the day’s patterns were only so-so. And the second try came up with only a single planetary transit-to-natal contact. Far too buggy at the moment. Probably just needs updating.
Its Android competitor is Xsonus’ Planetus. I have bought the full version for £2.62, despite finding the futuristic font a bit hard on the eyes ... and this is really good. Data entry is a breeze. The diagrams are literally revolutionary; the circle represents the 24-hour day, and arcs of varying colours show the times when the Moon, planets and Moon’s nodes form major aspects to planets in the user’s nativity. Tapping on these brings up the interpretations, which are better (so far) than those in Transits. Back and forward arrows move the transit date to and fro, and there is an instant return button to the current date. Don’t bother with the free version - the ads can be intrusive. I’m not usually a fan of daily horoscopes, but Planetus’ approach is detailed, attractive and engaging.
However, you may be looking for a fully-fledged mobile astrology program; and of course we can now include all our Windows favourites, as long as you are happy to shell out between £500 and £1000 on a Windows 8 Pro tablet. But what about all our Android phones and tablets? What about the iPad maxi and mini, the iPhone and iPod Touch?
As I write, I am waiting for my iPad Mini, a long-debated purchase as I don’t really need yet another pretty screenful of seductive apps; but it is so hard to find a ‘proper’ astrology program for Android. The main reason therefore for this extravagance is that Esotech have yet to respond to the increasing number of requests from Solar Fire users for a version that will run on Android, leaving us with Astro Gold for the iPad as our only option. For me it will still have its frustrations, as they seem to have abandoned the Draconic chart (widely used now) and I doubt that I shall find the dwadashamsha in there.
In the meantime, what is available? Well, I have been thoroughly spoilt, as since 2001 there has always been a Palm PDA in my pocket, and I bought my first one simply because while surfing online I discovered a Palm program called AstroPocket. This has been wonderful over the past 12 years, and will continue to delight me as there is a replacement Palm T3 waiting in the attic for the inevitable moment when the current T3 goes belly-up. These are hard to find now, and the Tungsten T3 was in my opinion the best machine Palm ever produced. Its one drawback is its volatile memory, but I have tried the later Palms - notably the TX - whose data was never at risk of loss if the battery went flat, and these used to crash, and loop, and thoroughly annoy me. My TX went to the charity shop and I started buying second-hand T3s.
AstroPocket The day may come when for whatever reason I can no longer use a T3, and therefore will lose AstroPocket; that will be a sad day. This lovely little program with its simple, clear menus (you can still find v.3.31 online although it’s years since Yves Robert stopped developing it; don’t be put off by the out-of-date v.2 screenshot! ) opens instantly at the touch of a custom button, and does almost anything you ask. Natal chart in Tropical, chosen Sidereal (six options), Draconic or Helio formats; Secondary, Tertiary, Minor progressions; true or mean Solar Arcs or degree-for-a-year; Solar Return for a custom location, with a precessed option; any whole-number harmonic chart; and Composite charts. It will list for you the planets, the aspects, and Midpoints with a choice of 6 moduli from 11°15' to 360°. You can view one chart, or two concentrically. All aspect, synastry and midpoint orbs can be preset as well as your home location for instant horaries; the standard aspect set includes Quintile and Biquintile. Both North and South Node can be displayed, Mean or True, and the planet options include all four major asteroids (pardon, Ceres! You are now a planet) plus Lilith, Vulcan and the eight Uranian planets for their enthusiasts. All saved charts can be assigned bespoke folders, and unfiled charts can be deleted en masse at a stroke. The only weak point in this amazing program is in fact its filing system; there is no ability to jump through a list alphabetically, nor can you whizz through on the Palm’s ‘down’ button, so searching a long list is tortuous with the only option repeated presses of the down arrow on-screen to move through one page at a time. But that apart, AstroPocket is a real star of PDA programming, a gold standard which I wish more developers would emulate.
Tropical Skies There is nothing so fine on my Android phone. I have found - so far - only three programs that come anywhere near AstroPocket, and they all fall short. The first one I bought was Tropical Skies from Jyotish Tools, who specialise in Vedic astrology and kindly thought to provide something for their Western friends. It’s an attractive little program which will quickly bring up a natal or horary chart in either the Tropical or Sidereal zodiac (Fagan-Bradley or Lahiri), with a choice of seven house systems and the option to include Chiron and minor aspects. Classic orbs can be made smaller. The chart wheel is lovely and clear, with the detailed positions of planets and house cusps listed below. In Landscape mode to the right of the wheel is an aspect grid and table of dignities, and this comes up as a second portrait page when swiped. But that’s it. If you want to do anything else with it you’ll need an ephemeris to hand.
Aquarius2Go After much searching, another program I found was Aquarius2Go. This now has pride of place on my home screen, as it’s pretty handy. To bring up the current chart all you do is choose Astro Clock from the first screen. Or choose Natal to enter data; or you may like to study the Moon calendar for a chosen year. This is a very useful function within the app; you select one of the year’s New Moons and this in turn brings up a precisely timed list of Lunar phenomena over the month - lunations, ingresses, perigee and apogee. Planet choices include Chiron and Lilith but no Ceres alas; aspects include Quintile and Biquintile, ‘Nonagon’ which I assume is Novile, and two types of ‘mirrorpoint.’ All orbs can be customised. You can set your home location, choose from four house systems, and even set the colour scheme (or none) for the elements. Again we have a crisp chart display which can be zoomed and moved around if required to see the chart positions more clearly; a button brings up the aspect grid which toggles to the ‘mirrorpoints’, which I call the Reflexes, and are more familiar as the antiscia/contra-antiscia. A Data button brings up the planetary and cuspal positions as detailed lists. The positions are very accurate. While the nativity is displayed, a touch on the bottom left border brings up further options - to switch the houses and aspects on or off, to return to the data screen for editing, delete the chart, adjust the graphic settings, and more ... this last down arrow takes you to the really useful menu where you can add the transits for any day to the wheel, add a chosen year’s Solar Return chart (no choice of location), put two charts up in a biwheel for synastry, add Solar Arcs, or display the natal chart with secondary progressions - direct or ‘retrograde’, ie converse. This means I can do converse as well as direct Dailies with consummate ease! But the display can do with improvement; I'd prefer a proper swappable bi-wheel for the radix and progressed charts. Moving to the second page allows you to move the current chart forward or backward in time by almost any chosen interval, and restore the radix at the touch of another button. Very handy indeed. I hope this program grows over time; it’s a very promising start.
AstroTab Before finding Aquarius2Go, I tried AstroTab (£6.45, and currently £8.43 for the Pro version) and found it seriously wanting. And uninstalled it. As in the interim it has clearly been updated it seemed worthwhile to give it another chance, so AstroTab Pro now nestles among the Galaxy apps. It has certainly improved. You can choose either a natal chart or the current transits for your home location as the home screen, and the sign colours are totally customisable. A tap on the chart changes it to the aspect grid page. A touch on the arrow at bottom right of the screen takes you to the time-jump function, whose interval and speed you can customise in Settings. Unfortunately there is no way to return to the radix once you have left it! There is the choice of Tropical or 5 versions of Sidereal, and happily both ends of the nodal axis are available plus Chiron, Pholus, Ceres, and the three major asteroids. Aspect orbs are user-defined, and so is their appearance; the stronger the aspect, the less transparent. There are five House systems, and you can opt to display the house cusps on the inside or outside of the wheel - or not at all. The horizon can be aligned to the inner or the outer chart, or not at all. For a choice of natal chart, chart with transits or a synastry biwheel you have to use a menu at the top left - unlike the other astrology programs. Easy to miss this! It makes AstroTab less intuitive and fluent than the more elegant Aquarius2Go. Also, a press of the phone’s back button often prompts AstroTab to quit instead of moving back a step. This is annoying. But this is the only Android program so far to offer Composite charts. A swipe of the chart page takes you to the ‘Natals (sic) Planets List’ and once more to an interpretations text, which is frankly appalling - partly because of its brevity and largely because of some woefully inadequate translation. When you are in a chart chosen from the top of the screen you have to go back to the bottom menu to access the chart list or calculate a new chart. And I have just managed to put up a synastry chart with myself. All in all, AstroTab is a pretty awful mess whether free, paid or Pro, and unless it gets its act together soon it will be leaving the Galaxy!
Astracadabra Now, back in 2004 the late Neville Lang - greatly-missed by our community - created a program for Windows Mobile called Astracadabra, which he developed up to version 1.8 before it was discontinued (again, downloads are still accessible online from http://alabe.com/downloads under Legacy Software.) As this was the current, and first, mobile successor to Solar Fire, I bought a second-hand HP PDA and loaded the program. Sadly, it could not compete with Astropocket as its format was more complex and I had little use for the HP machine, which found a new owner. So that was that until this year when I found myself wondering if I could get used to it again. After a few initial hiccups with registration and the urgent purchase of yet another second-hand Windows Mobile PDA, this time a Dell Axim X30, I was able to reacquaint myself with its intricacies. It opens to the current transits wheel, under which are tabs ‘Opened’, ‘Show’, ‘Aspects’, ‘Info’ which respectively offer a data list view, the wheel, a toggle for aspects on/off, and the chart details including declinations. At the bottom left are ‘Chart’ and ‘Tools’; the first allows setting up or editing charts, with a choice of zodiacs including Draconic, while clicking on the latter leads to a long row of user options including a useful Vedic module, and the choice of home location. These are navigated using arrow keys on the right (which obscure the up-coming choices.) Above ‘Opened’ is a small box with an arrow marked Natal; the arrow opens a vertical list of actions to perform instantly on the natal chart: synastry, transits, secondary progressions, tertiaries, minors, Solar Arcs, Solar Returns, User Progressions and User Directions, Krishnamurti Chart (I assume), plus Age Harmonic and Age Harmonic+1. Phew! But there is so much chasing around to do with the stylus, and charts take quite a few seconds to appear ... Astracadabra is still the ‘nearly but not quite’ of PDA programs in my view.
It then disappeared from view, as the internal battery of the Axim was telling me it was dead, and I tried moving the program for safety to the SD card. It refused to launch at all, until I did a soft reset. Maybe it’ll get fixed.
Back to the present then, 2013 and the current crop of mobile apps.
What else have we got? There are quite a lot of decent astronomy apps to choose from, some of which have astrological listings. One of my favourites which you may already have found is DeLuxe Moon. On Android this program dedicated to all things lunar is visually utterly beautiful and keeps you bang up to date with every astrological and astronomical detail of the Moon’s progress that you could think of. Too much to try to describe or even list. Do take a look at it, if it is new to you.
There are also ephemerides for Android, and I’ve peeked at a few. One of the best of these seems to be Ephemeris, Astrology Software by Sunil Jain. ‘It covers the time period from 1751 AD to 2150 AD. It calculates the geocentric position of Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, and the Nodes of Moon (Rahu and Ketu). The application replaces the paper based Ephemeris, Panchangs, Indian calendars, moon and planet based calendars used by Astrologers and Jyotishs (practitioners of Astrology) completely and is a full-fledged astrological software.’ The app comes with the following three options: Indian, Local and Western Ephemeris. So you can choose to view the geocentric longitude of planets at 05:30 am IST at 28N39 latitude and 77E13 longitude, and/or at12:00 am local time at your selected location, and/or at 00:00 UT on the prime meridian for any selected month and year. A chart calculation module is also included (but no wheels as far as I know, only Vedic squares.)
All I need now is the means to play with AstroGold!
Fast forward a few days ~ ~ and here I am with the sleek iPad Mini at my side in its pretty Poetic Wing smart cover and the first of five astrology programs open for inspection. I bought and installed Astro Gold (of course), Astrolgo, Planet Lab, iNew Astrology and Kairon.
Kairon I had great hopes of Kairon, as it looked so smart with its crisp pastel graphics on midnight blue and black; but sadly no-one has seen fit to update it since June 2011. Nevertheless, I risked it (and I now understand that a major update is on the way.) However, it proved very difficult to get going. I had to join the Kairon forum and ask for advice - speedily given - before I learned how to install it and establish my required settings without it crashing. You have to download it on the iPad itself, then get all the settings sorted (in the iPad Settings menu itself) before opening the app. If the settings aren’t showing up, you have to exit Kairon, double-click the iPad’s button to bring up the active apps bar, and press on Kairon’s icon till the little round red and white sign appears in its top left corner. Click on this, hit the iPad button again to restore normality, and reopen Kairon. All should now be well! But I still can’t delete an unwanted file; and the data sequence is a bit back to front as you have to name the file again to save it after first opening the new chart. Its functions (once you have decided on planets, asteroids, Transneptunians, aspects, and Tropical or whatever Sidereal) include straight synastry, composite charts and ‘combined’ charts; the latter turn out to be Davison composites. Also Secondaries, Solar Arcs, Solar Returns and, usefully, Lunar Returns. I am not sure if these can be saved and composited with nativities as I would like to. Displays are a wheel(s) page, an aspect grid where aspect orbs can be modified on a slider, a text page for all the degree/min positions etc, and the ‘methods’ page where functions are chosen. There are context help pages as you go. So Kairon is actually very nice; but I do miss having the degree positions on the wheels; they are indicated by fine lines from the planets, otherwise you have to switch to the text page. I have yet to find out how to get to Firdaria etc. Maybe the promised update (no ETA!) will banish the installation and customising gremlins.
Horoscope JIKU I also looked at, but haven’t bought, Horoscope JIKU - from Japan but available in delightfully eccentric English. This is a very pretty program with an option to view the chart planets as physical objects against constellation images rather than symbols on a plain chart. There are many house systems to choose from, but only the Tropical zodiac. However, the main asteroids are included, and charts can be progressed and - I think - composited. Not only a bi-wheel but a tri-wheel also is available for chart comparison. An ephemeris is displayed both in tabular form and as planetary arcs on a wheel. The Developers say they intend to keep adding to the program, so I shall wait and see how it grows before spending money. (There is a free download, but with very limited functions.)
iPhemeris Another very good-looking iPad program which I haven’t downloaded is iPhemeris by Clifford Ribaudo. Visually it is very attractive and can be customised, accuracy should be very high, and I would probably like it very much; but so far there are no composites, no helio charts, no contrantiscia and needless to say no draconic or dwads, so at the moment I have no incentive to pay the best part of £9 for an app that is unlikely to outshine Astro Gold. But you may find it ideal for you.
Astrolgo Open on screen, however, is Astrolgo. At first this program really put me off because the display colours can’t be customised, and I find the chart wheel most unattractive. However, once you grapple with the occasionally obstinate input box and find out how to set up a nativity and save it for reloading, Astrolgo has a lot to offer not found elsewhere. (My confusion arose when the ‘Use Current Time’ slider only changed the chart to the current time when moved to ‘off’!!! But that’s how it goes.) The master menu opens from the left hand side (accessed from the ‘Astrolgo’ button at top left) and further options appear along the top of the screen. At the top of the main menu is the afore-mentioned Here and Now section; from here you also access chart input generally, under ‘Specify Other’. The fun starts after you work through the Settings to choose from several Western and Vedic layouts including Heliocentric, many asteroids, Fixed Stars, lots, fortunes, trans-neptunians, declinations, harmonics, user points etc, load your chosen data and hit ‘Chart’; once this is on-screen you can then work down the menu on the left. First of all, if you have put a goodly selection of small bodies onto the screen you won’t be able to see the wood for the trees, and you need to switch off the aspect lines! You also need to familiarise yourself with the asteroid etc symbols; I prefer names any day - far clearer. You access Settings on a cogwheel button at the top right of the screen, and use it all the time to make choices about the chart you are studying. Declinations, for example, are shown as an unusual pattern in the centre of the chartwheel - except that those of you who have looked into the work of the Magi Society will recognise these as the Declination Charts they have developed over the past couple of decades. So you’ll want to hide the aspects when examining these, or end up in utter chaos! (Which asteroid, I learn from Astrolgo, is currently on my MC ...) In the main menu, Rulership is interesting, as when you scroll down, the table of Dignities is followed by diagrams of the Chain of Dispositors, the Chain of Exhaltations (sic), the Chain of Banishment, and the Chain of Downfall - if you have selected these in the Settings. Next, under Views, we are treated to a movable Orrery with Julian date and the rise-set periods of Sun, Moon and planets, a nice display of the Earth Shadow at the time of the chart, the detailed Ephemeris positions of every selected body, and a useful scrollable almanac of celestial phenomena. The figures are small, and you can’t zoom the page, so you may need a magnifying glass if your eyes are having a bad day! One small annoyance to me is that there appears to be no option to turn off the Dark Moon Lilith, which I don’t use and is a distraction. Two charts can be compared adjacent to each other (top menu), or displayed in a biwheel, or composited. Your choice; see the Settings again.
Downsides: belated reference to the Help menu suggested that location could be pinpointed on a map - so far there is no sign of this. Location entry is tortuous. And the ‘interactive’ features are a disaster; very obscure, and experiments crashed the display. The User Points are buried deep in the Settings; one-click antiscia/ contrantiscia would have been nicer, to put in a biwheel with the radix. As I write, Astrolgo was last updated by Glenn Andreas in December 2012; can we look forward to some useful and overdue repairs, tweaks or additions soon?
Now for PlanetLab. It opened for me just now in the chart I last left. The wheel is simple, clear, and (thank heaven) zoomable. The menus are at the bottom of the screen on left and right; the button symbols are pretty intuitive. Once you have your radix, and have selected Tropical, Sidereal or Helio from the world symbol at bottom right, a tap on the shadow-person (bottom centre left) brings up the action menu: Natal, Progressions, Transits, Returns, Synastry and Horary. This is where you can bring up a Here-&-Now chart, with a quick tap on the Horary button, and a further tap on the tiny wheel to the right of its context menu (bottom left of screen again) which opens the now-familiar iPad data spinner plus a ‘Now’ button. Use it.
At this point I was really missing Ceres, so opted to spend 69p on the extra planet pack. Once you have your chart on-screen, tapping on the middle of the three little context wheels lets you choose whole-chart mode, a detailed aspectarian, a harmonic dial of your choice (set at bottom right on the musical note), tabulated midpoints in that harmonic, a graphic ephemeris, reports, and primary directions (direct and converse.) Reports are highly customisable as you will see; click on the ‘Update’ button when you are ready to view up to a month of transits and celestial phenomena.
The left-most context wheel is where you find current progressions, transits, returns, synastry and horary as mentioned. Each chart, please note, alters the context menu on the right-most button; for example, there is a choice of year and either Solar or Lunar Returns, which you can display singly or in a biwheel with the nativity, either chart at the centre. Progressions can be swapped with true or fixed Solar Arcs, and the dates adjusted on the spinner. Under Transits similar choices apply - here we also find Composites, and any date and time can be chosen (but not place, which is frustrating!) However, get into the Synastry context menu and this is resolved ... or would be if it worked. Very sadly, I cannot get a composite chart at all, either under Transits or Synastry, only shared biwheels. When I ask for the composite all the program does is show me the current Horary. What a pity; PlanetLab was doing so well!
It’s another nice program - very quick, accurate and unfussy on the whole, with some interesting options, and I shall probably keep it, along with the very different Astrolgo, despite the fact that its Composite feature is horribly buggy and needs fixing, pronto.
Astro Gold I am hoping that Astro Gold, more than twice the price of the other programs, is going to live up to its growing - and glowing - reputation. I know I shall be deprived of my beloved dwads and Draconic, hopefully not for ever; but how does it compare to the others?
Well, for a start, a quick tap on the refresh button at the top of the screen instantly displays the current chart. An instant horary if required. Good. Hit ‘Charts’, and the selected chart’s data are shown in a box, with a right arrow. Follow this, and here is your data input, your action menu. If you don’t want to create a new chart, ‘Select from File’ leads to the database. I found it so easy to email SF chart files to the iPad and open them in Astro Gold! Choose a file, choose a chart, tap it, and up it comes in all its golden glory. Display colours aren’t as tweakable as in Solar Fire, so I have opted, in the settings (top menu), to show planets and signs in black. Degrees and minutes of Retrograde planets are in red. It all looks very smart. And it can be zoomed, as can the grid (top menu again.) Unwanted charts in either list can be deleted by dragging across the name from left to right and pressing the red Delete button that appears.
Under ‘Subsidiary charts’, doing a Solar Return is a piece of cake; you can choose the natal or current location very quickly. Likewise a progressed chart (direct only) is easy, and opting for Mean Quotidian gives you Daily Angles if you wish. Solar Arcs are fine, so are composites, and as recent charts are all listed on the left, you can choose any two charts to put into a biwheel, whose rings are quickly swappable. On the top menu next to Settings is a button for a choice of reports - interpretations, detailed positions, aspects list and transits for a specified period, whose sort order can be changed through another sub-menu. It all works very well, and I look forward to Astro Gold’s evolution. Steph keeps us all up to date on its progress via the Facebook Astro Gold group.
What I long for is a Harmonic function, antiscia/contrantiscia, converse progressions, and at least an option to work with User Arcs, which would offer many work-arounds. The addition of a Vedic module with full divisional charts, as in Solar Fire, would please a lot of us. Until these are built into this beautiful software, I shall have to chop and change between several different competing programs on the iPad.
iNew Astrology These now include iNew Astrology; a quick peek followed by a closer look prompted me to buy it; it has a strong Vedic emphasis, and the graphics could be more distinctive. But it does seem to offer quite a lot, including - crucially - divisional charts, so at least I have one means of looking at a dwad chart on the iPad, even though the degrees/minutes are absent.
So there we are; my first foray into technical reviews! It has been a very personal journey of course, and you will have your own needs and perspectives. But hopefully this has been a useful introduction to the devices and programs that are out there, with their pluses and minuses, and may help you to choose the platform and mobile astrology app that is perfect for you, your own Top Gear.