Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com.
On today's episode let's take a look at the Flyover feature of Apple Maps.
Flyover is a feature of the Apple Maps app.
You can find that in your Dock.
If you don't find it there you can look in the Applications folder.
To bring up Flyover you have to go to a city that has Flyover enabled.
So they put together a flyover animation.
Not all cities have it.
To find out if yours does, or one that you want to visit does, type in the name of the
city, like this.
Don't select any suggestions or favorites or anything like that.
Just type in the name of the city and it will bring up the city here.
You will notice at the bottom of the screen it says 3D Flyover Tour of Denver with a Start
button.
If you don't see that appear you may want to try and make sure you've got the city typed
in in the most generic form possible.
Like Paris comma France or San Francisco comma California.
That kind of thing.
I find that if you include things like the zip code or something more specific it sometimes
doesn't appear.
If you still don't see it, it's probably just because there is no flyover tour of that particular
city.
The Flyover button will go away if you click on anything or do any other action.
You can get it back by selecting the city if the pin is still there, clicking the i
and you can see a Flyover Tour button here.
So either way you do it, when you initiate Flyover it will switch to a 3D satellite view
and start moving around.
You will see it says 3D Flyover Tour there with an End button right next to it.
You can just watch it.
Notice that it will actually tell you what you are seeing.
So it will just put something like Downtown or it will tell you the name of a particular
building as it continues to fly around and give you an overview of the city that you
are looking at.
At any time you can actually click and take over what is going on there.
So I've grabbed the screen there.
It kind of pauses Flyover and I can move around or just hold that image to look.
If I release it quickly resumes the tour.
So you can see here it is going to zoom in on the art museum building and it will label
it down here.
I click end and it will zoom to the end position for the flyover which is usually a city overview
like this.
It is a lot of fun to use for trip planning and to just get an overview of a city.
You can find that most of the major cities of the world have Flyover enabled.
Notice that the 3D views are made basically from arial photography of the city at different
angles and that is used to computer generate a 3D map so then you can look around.
So I can grab here and you can see I can look on either side of the Eiffel Towel and it
has the texture for this 3D model based on the 3D flyover images.
You also have Flyover in the Maps app in iOS 8 of course.
You basically do it the same way.
It just looks a little bit different.
So you go it and it says 3D Flyover Tour at the top with a Start button.
But other than that it works pretty much the same.
You can kind of take control of it if you tap and hold and then release and then it
will resume the flyover.