There’s a nicely done new Apple Maps feature hidden in iOS 8 Beta 2. Called City Tours, it’s basically a set of manually programmed and scripted virtual tours of select major cities, rendered and animated in Maps’ three-dimensional Flyover mode.
Apple hasn’t talked about City Tours during its WWDC keynote (aside from a brief mention on one slide) and the feature couldn’t be found on the official iOS 8 webpage, in WWDC session videos or inside Apple’s official developer documentation…
Fortunately, these virtual tours can be enabled manually on devices running iOS 8 Beta 2 and developer Pierre Blasquez has been able to accomplish just that.
As first noted by MacRumors editor Eric Slivka, Blasquez partnered with Mac4Ever [Google Translate] to publish a video showing an example City Tour of Paris.
He was also able to unlock City Tours for several other cities, like Rome, Stockholm, Barcelona, New York, Paris, Glasgow, Cape Town, Perth, Bordeaux and the San Francisco Bay. We expect the list to grow after iOS 8 makes its landfall in Fall.
Google Maps/Earth have long had similar virtual tours of major points of interests so it goes without saying that adding City Tours to iOS 8 Maps is a smart move.
Hopefully, it’s not among the Maps features Apple’s reportedly put on the back burner.
What do you think of Maps’ City Tours?