Planetdance, the new astrology app for the Android platform, was first released on July 15th 2013 - and it out-performs every other mobile app I have tried over the past year, with the partial exception of Esoteric Astrology’s Astro Gold, which is certainly the best available for iPad and iPhone. I say partial, because both apps are beautifully presented and intuitive to use, with clear and comprehensive menus; both use the Swiss Ephemeris for calculation (here, 1BC-2400AD), so accuracy in both is state of the art. But Planetdance has been developed by Jean Cremers in Gröningen using a new tool, QT for Android, and he has been able to incorporate many extremely useful techniques that at the moment are still missing from Astro Gold.
First of all, Planetdance is immensely customisable; you can use the settings to change pretty well everything - the size of the fonts and menu buttons, preferred symbols, the colours of signs, lines and planets, aspects, orbs, rulerships, places, date format, language (German, English, French or Dutch) etc etc. All of these and more are accessed in the Options menu.
Calculation is fast, and choices are many. As well as the basic Tropical chart there are twenty-five Sidereal options, the Heliocentric chart, and the Dwad of the Tropical Radix - plus an exceptionally useful User Arc which is found with the Progressions - this means that you can try out any kind of zodiacal idea ... and what is more you can make perfect Draconic or Current Draconic charts by subtracting the Moon’s North Node from 360º and using the result as the User Arc input. This is accurate to degrees and minutes.
Charts are displayed using a choice of eleven house systems, and all the planets are displayed (or not, as you decide) including Chiron. I am hoping Ceres will join them on the wheel eventually. You can view charts either in portrait or landscape mode on your Android tablet or phone (supporting resolutions of 800x480 and above) with no need for any further connection once the app is installed. You can choose which chart you want to display at startup, and the current Transit will provide you with a very quick and accurate horary for your default location.
So what else do we have here? Radix 1 and 2 (switchable .. Radix 1 is the working chart), Transits including Live Transits, Solar and Lunar Returns, Secondary progressions (direct and converse), Quotidians (ie Daily Progressed Charts), Composites, Harmonics, and Solar Arcs. All main subsidiary charts can be displayed in a bi-wheel with the radix chart. And as well as charts there is a very handy Transit graph, also tables of natal data (this is where you find the main asteroids, Fortuna and the Uranians), aspects, midpoints, and fixed stars, as well as a daily ephemeris and the ability to take a screenshot. There is also an option for parallax calculation.
The location database has over 90,000 places listed; and as it is fully editable you can also create new locations for special circumstances. The main chart database has a dedicated menu so that it can be efficiently managed, and fresh databases created. This comes with a selection of famous names to get you started.
If you do have any problems, Planetdance’s comprehensive Help menu will guide you; otherwise you can go to FAQ at http://forum.jcremers.com.
This is the mobile astrology program I have been longing for. A heartfelt thank you, Jean!