The references books I used to thumb through on rainy day visits to the library as a kid—your almanacs, your encyclopedias, your reference books—are all going digital. If the results are as good as what Barefoot World Atlas has to offer, that’s not a bad trend at all.

Barefoot World Atlas is an iPad version of the Nick Crane-authored and David Dean-illustrated book of the same name. The app arrives courtesy of Touch Press, the same outfit that offers the terrific iPad version of The Elements. The same care and quality that went into that visual display of the Periodic Table of the Elements can be found in this kid-focused atlas app.

Launch the app, and after a title screen that lingers a little bit too long, you’ll be treated to the site of a spinning 3D globe. You can make the globe spin yourself by dragging or swiping; a reverse pinch gesture lets you zoom in for a closer look. All the countries of the world are clearly labeled—their borders less so—and if you zoom in close enough, you’ll even see the flags of countries flapping in the breeze. (Yes, flapping—the app features a little bit of animation as well.) More important, the landscape is dotted with landmarks, people and other objects. Tapping any one of those items—Teotihuacan in Mexico, a Scottish boy in the United Kingdom, a Soyuz rocket floating above Kazakhstan—will bring up a short entry on the topic. A narrator will tell you how to pronounce each object (invaluable when you tap on Teotihuacan, by the way), and you have the option of having the entry read to you, if you prefer.

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When I was about 10 years old, I decided it was time to graduate from the Scholastic Reader-approved books of my youth to what I determined was meatier, more adult fare. I checked out a book from the library about World War II—it may well have been one of those Time-Life overviews of the war that doubtlessly make serious historians cringe. But for a 10-year-old it was just the sort of stuff to spark an interest in history that continues to this day.

The 10-year-olds of 2012 have more sophisticated tools at their disposal in the form of Apple’s iPad. And that’s given developers a chance to use the iPad’s touch interface and multimedia support to make history come alive in ways that few people probably imagined back in 1982. I’ve recently spent some time with a pair of apps—World War II Interactive and Timeline World War 2—that take the same information about the war that I pored over decades ago and present it in an eye-popping new fashion. Both apps are worthwhile downloads for history buffs, particularly students, but one of them in particular does a standout job of putting its own stamp on the story of the conflict.

World War II Interactive from Internet Design Zone offers a well-organized blend of text, photos, maps, and multimedia that together provide a solid overview of the conflict. The app splits up the story of World War II into nine sections, with chapters that focus on the events leading up to the war and the aftermath—the sort of valuable contextual details that sometimes get short shrift in apps like this.

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Google has gone big with the changes in the latest version of its mobile search app for iOS, starting with full-screen searches and views for the iPhone. Other changes introduced in Google Search 2.0.0 Wednesday include speed improvements, an enhanced yet simplified user interface, and gesture tweaks for easy navigation.

Wednesday’s update marked the ongoing evolution of an app that’s been around as long as Apple’s App Store. What started out as a unified app for searching for websites, contacts, and businesses near your current location has added features like voice-activated searches and iPad compatibility. The 2.0.0 release puts the focus on enhancing the iPhone version. Here’s what to expect when you fire up the updated app.

When you launch Google Search, the app greets you with your User ID (if you’re signed in) and two shortcuts along the top of the screen—one to tweak settings and another to toggle between search results and the main app screen. Just below that, you’ll find the Google logo (sometimes depicted as the doodle of the day), a text entry area, and shortcuts to Google Apps, Voice, and Goggles.

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The Night Sky from iCandiApps is a stargazing app for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. You point your iOS device skyward, and see a real-time, geolocated display of the heavenly bodies overhead—stars, constellations, planets, satellites, and galaxies.

Move your device around, and you can explore what ever celestial stuff should be right above you. Of course, if you’re using the app during the daytime, Night Sky will show you objects you might expect to see come nightfall; it’s awfully hard to spot Mars when the sun is shining bright.

By default, the app includes a goofy space-age soundtrack; you can disable it. You can’t control which space objects the app displays with a sole exception: Satellites aren’t displayed unless you manually toggle them on.

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I’ve always enjoyed poring over a good map. Whether it’s thumbing through a road atlas, spinning around a globe, or sticking pushpins into a wall map to designate where I’ve been and where I want to go, I can find countless ways to amuse myself with a well-designed map. So if there’s an app that can bring that experience to the iPad and tell me a little more about the world around me, I’m eager to give it a try.

National Geographic Society offers a pair of iPad-optimized atlas apps—World Atlas HD and The World by National Geographic. Both apps deliver the world to your tablet, with an easy-to-control interface and a decent amount of data. Unfortunately, neither app taps into the full capabilities of iOS and both left me wanting more.

Let’s start with World Atlas HD, a mainstay in the top download charts on the App Store. Launch World Atlas HD, and it’s easy to see why: The app opens to a gorgeously rendered globe, either in portrait or landscape view, that you can spin and rotate with just the touch of a finger. You’ve got a choice of three looks—the sepia-hued Executive view, a brighter Classic look, and Satellite. The controls will be familiar to anyone who’s used an iOS device: Double-tap or pinch outward to zoom in, or pinch inward to zoom out. Move your finger in any direction to scroll to new part of the map.

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I’m a big fan of bird identification apps, so I was thrilled to learn that Peterson Field Guides in tandem with Appweavers had created a new birding app for iOS devices. Peterson Birds of North America is a digital version of Peterson’s well established collection of high quality field guides, and is optimized to work on all iOS devices. The app features a database of more than 800 birds and 700 recorded bird calls or field-recorded bird sounds. Unfortunately, the Peterson guide wasn’t all that I’d hoped it would be.

Since the Peterson Guide is a universal app it works in almost exactly the same way on the iPad as it does on the iPhone and iPod touch. Launching the app brings up a grid of birds organized by family groupings, such as woodpeckers, hummingbirds, and flycatchers. On smaller iOS devices, five other options appear below this grid where you can select menu items for browsing and searching the database, or view sighting lists that you’ve previously created. On the iPad, these same options are available on the right-hand side of the screen once you select a family grouping.

Tapping one of the bird groupings in the grid takes you to a new screen displaying several birds from the family you’ve selected. Tapping one of the birds in the new window provides very basic information on the bird that you’ve selected. On the iPad, this means that all the other birds but the one you’ve selected on the screen are blurred slightly and the name of your selected bird is displayed on a small bar on the left-hand side of the screen. On your iPhone, a similar bar appears at the top of the screen displaying the bird’s name and a small scrolling field with basic identification information.

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RedShift is a $12 universal planetarium app. Like the awesome Pocket Universe, this app from USM aims to bring the entirety of the nighttime sky onto your iOS device. It’s amazing.

With your permission, Redshift uses your current location to show you precisely which stars, constellations, and planets you should be able to see. If you enable the Follow Sky option, RedShift will update what you should expect to see as you point your iPad or iPhone at different spots in the sky while you pan around. If you can generally just pick out one of the Dippers, Red Shift will open your eyes to many more constellations.

An observatory option lets you jump from your own location’s view of the sky to any celestial object you’d like to see—the moon, a planet, or a specific star. You can zoom in to impressive levels of depth, too.

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Editor’s Note: The following review is adapted from Five Star Apps: The Best iPhone and iPad Apps for Work and Play by Glenn Fleishman. (2010, Pearson Education and Peachpit Press).

Simply designed, Parcel from Ivan Pavlov includes support for 28 delivery services. Major shippers like FedEx, UPS, and the US Postal Service are all included. The app, which is optimized for the iPad as well as the iPhone and iPod touch, shows a few shippers by default; use the Settings app to add others or remove those displayed.

A built-in barcode scanner lets you add a tracking number from a package you’re sending by snapping a shot of the label. This saves the tedious entry of long tracking codes.

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You may be a poet and not even know it. But even poets and songwriters occasionally get stuck on a word. What rhymes with iambic pentameter, anyway? Under such circumstances, a decent rhyming dictionary is indispensable.

Ben Turley’s Rhyme Time helps fill the bill as a simple but reasonably sophisticated rhyming dictionary for the iPhone and iPod touch. The interface is what you might expect of a dictionary: drab and utilitarian. You tap the search bar and up pops the keypad. Type in your word and the app will return a range of word selections.

Depending on the word, Rhyme Time will provide options—words or phrases—broken down by syllable count. For example, with a word such as “verity,” Rhyme Time returned nearly 40 words and phrases up to 11 syllables (“geometrical irregularity”). More helpful is the way the app formats results, with bold, standard, and light colored text denoting words based on their frequency of usage.

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When you’ve got a mobile software store that offers more than a quarter-of-a-million apps, you’re bound to have some offerings that not offer similar features but also sport nearly identical names. Take the case of Advanced English Dictionary and Thesaurus from Mobile Systems and Advanced English Dictionary & Thesaurus from jDictionary Mobile. Both are iOS apps that deliver dictionary features to your iOS device. But is there anything separating the two? I mean, other than that ampersand in the latter app’s name? To find out, I took both dictionary offerings out for a test drive.

Mobile Systems’s app—the ampersand-free Advanced English Dictionary and Thesaurus—brings WordNet, Princeton University’s 1.4 million-word lexical database, to the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Optimized for all of Apple’s iOS devices, the app is more than its name suggests, as it also includes a variety of word search options and encyclopedia functions. The Mobile Systems app performs its named duties well, but its add-ons leave some to be desired.

When you first open the Mobile Systems app, you see, from the near top to the total bottom of your screen, a list of words in alphabetical order, along with a search bar at the very top of your screen. You can either scroll through that word list or use the search field to look up a word’s definition.

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Give a man a fish, the saying goes, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime. The same holds true, I think, in the world of cocktails. Teach a man to make a credible martini, and he’ll stop spending all his time worrying about fish.

Several App Store offerings have emerged with the precise aim of teaching you how to make that martini as well as other drinks. I took a look at a trio of cocktail app for Apple’s tablet and found myself raising my glass in tribute to two of them. As for the third app, let’s just say that sometimes I drink to forget.

Let’s start the round with Cocktails HD. The $5 app from Pocket Cocktails is essentially a 241-page e-book, containing information on assorted spirits, bartending techniques, and drink styles. You can read through the app in either portrait or landscape views, turning pages with a flick of a finger or with the use of a helpful slider at the top of the screen. With the help of Cocktails HD, you can master everything from making simple syrup to creating a decorative fruit boat to garnish a tropical cocktail.

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Expenditure from Shape is a simple little app that helps you track and organize your finances with a minimum of fuss. But the $2 offering lacks some of the features of its free competitors, even if is a little easier to use.

Entering expenses and income on the app isn’t complicated, and Expenditure lets users attach photos and notes to remind them where their money went. You can pre-program recurring expenses and paychecks, making it simple to keep a running tally of how much money you have available. That number is featured in a large font size whenever you launch Expenditure.

The problem? Expenditure is entirely self-contained. There’s no way to export data from your iPhone to your computer, or vice versa. Free offerings like Pageonce Bills and Mint.com let you access your data via the Web from desktop computers, at least. They also plug into your online banking and bill-paying accounts. Expenditure lacks these features.

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Terminology from Agile Tortoise is an attractive dictionary app, available in a $2 iPad edition as well as a $1 iPhone version, which goes by the name of Terminology Ph. Regardless of the version, Terminology is a good-looking app—replete with smart font choices, a pleasant minimalist look, and an eye-friendly color palette. If you want a dictionary on your iOS device, Terminology’s the one to pick.

As you tap out words along Terminology’s left column, a list of words that match what you’ve typed updates live. Well, sort of—I found that the filtered list consistently and noticeably lagged, which was annoying, but not a show-stopper. When you see the word you’re after, you simply tap it, and the definition appears.

Those definitions are presented in a clean, clear layout that’s highly reminiscent of the printed dictionaries these iPad and iPhone apps emulate. On the iPad, things are, unsurprisingly, a bit roomier and better laid-out, but the iPhone version manages to avoid feeling cramped and does the best it can with the limited screen real estate.

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This week’s app roundup brings you new and better ways to get in shape, watch TV, and battle alien pigs. Because in space, no one can hear you oink.

Already this week, Macworld’s Lex Friedman brought you news of Smule’s latest offering—Beatstream, an app that takes tracks from your iTunes library and turns them into a Tap Tap Revenge-style game. Lex also reported that the popular new game Draw Something had been acquired by Zynga. Jason Snell let us know about the update of Comixology’s Comics app to take advantage of the new iPad’s high-definition Retina display. And Chris Breen took a first look at the MyTunes Pro music apps, which he called “an attractive app given its $10 price.”

Here are a few other new and updated apps that caught our eye this week:

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Thursday’s iBooks 2 update delivered interactive textbooks to the iPad. These books incorporate video clips, moving diagrams, audio commentary, and other new features that exploit the iPad’s touch interface. With a handful of such books already available for purchase from the new Textbooks section in the iBookstore, I decided to take the updated iBooks out for a test drive. What I found were books that feature stunning images and impressive graphics that make traditional printed textbooks feel out-of-date.

What’s available now?

iBooks textbooks are geared for the K-12 grade levels at this point; as of Thursday, the books available in the iBookstore are specifically aimed at high schoolers. Apple says it’s working closely with major textbook publishers Pearson, McGraw Hill, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to bring widely used textbooks to life through this new format. Those three publishers account for about 90 percent of textbooks sold in the U.S., according to Apple senior vice president of worldwide product marketing Phil Schiller.

Pearson has two titles available for purchase (covering biology and environmental science, respectively), while McGraw Hill has five—for physics, chemistry, algebra, geometry, and biology. For elementary-school aged kids, DK Publishing has three textbooks available. These companies already have more textbooks in the works.

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As rumored last month, Apple updated its Apple Store iOS app on Thursday, expanding its in-store pickup pilot program to all of its U.S. retail locations and adding a new EasyPay feature that lets customers buy some items simply by scanning their barcodes.

Apple’s goal has always been to simplify the retail experience, and the new Apple Store app is no exception. Now, if you purchase a product through the application, you’ll be given a new option at checkout: “Pick up this item.” Tapping that will prompt you to select a nearby Apple Store, and will even let you know whether or not the item is in stock. In most case, Apple says, in-stock items can be picked up with an hour. (Apple was previously allowing in-store pickup at a small number of locations for orders placed on its website; that feature now allows you to pick up at any U.S. store as well.)

If an item is not available immediately, the app will give you an estimate of when you can pick it up. For example, I configured a Mac mini with build-to-order options for processor, memory, and storage and was told that it would be available at any of the three closest Apple Stores on November 22. (By comparison, I was told the same model would ship directly to me within 2 to 4 days.)

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NASA’s space shuttle program lifts off for the last time this week, with space shuttle Atlantis slated to take off on Friday, July 8. And two iOS apps aim to let you participate in the launch.

If you’re looking to follow the shuttle as it orbits the planet en route to the International Space Station on its 12-day mission, GoSoftWorks’s free GoAtlantis app will let you know when to turn your gaze skyward. The universal app will provide real-time tracking of the final space shuttle mission and, using the location capabilities of your iPhone or iPad, predict when the shuttle will pass over you and where you should look.

GoSoftWorks released GoAtlantis as a free app to commemorate the last space shuttle mission, but the company has other paid apps in its roster as well. GoSatWatch allows you to track hundreds of satellites currently orbiting in space much in the same way as the GoAtlantis app will do with the shuttle, while GoSkyWatch Planetarium helps you identify stars, planets, constellations, and other celestial bodies simply by pointing your iOS device toward the night sky.

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For those of us Bay Area folk who cross the Bay Bridge time and again, it’s hard not to notice the ongoing NASA-launchpad-like construction for the bridge’s new eastern span replacement. Starting this lovely Memorial Day weekend, drivers will have to endure a new detour on the Eastbound Oakland side that will span until the completion of the bridgework in 2013. But not to worry, concerned drivers: The Bay Bridge Public Information Office hopes to ease your traffic-addled nerves and frazzled composure by allowing you to virtually drive this detour before you ever hop on the road—all thanks to an iOS app.

Powered by the Unreal Engine, the Bay Bridge Explorer app is a fully 3D-rendered version of the old Bay Bridge we know and love. You’ll start on the Oakland side in an overhead view that shows you exactly where the Eastbound detour is taking place; then, once you’ve gotten your bearings, you can drive alongside your fellow 3D-rendered passengers.

Once you successfully go through the detour once, you’ll unlock the ability to drive on the original bridge in both directions (in case you’re nostalgic for those pre-detour days); there are two future routes labeled “coming soon,” as well—perhaps to show poor, beleaguered drivers what they have to look forward to as the bridge-building progresses.

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It’s not just Apple’s retail stores that underwent a bit of a makeover over the weekend. The company’s Apple Store iPhone app scored a few updates of its own.

New in version 1.3 of the Apple Store app is an enhanced in-store mode. When you’re comfortably ensconced in the white walls of your neighborhood store, you can fire up the app for various bits of interactivity, at least some of which seems genuinely useful. For example, the app can alert you to the next available time slot for a Genius Bar appointment, along with a countdown to the next scheduled in-store workshop event. You can also tap a button to request that a customer service representative come speak with you in the store.

The other major addition to the app is useful even when you’re not at the Apple Store: You can now customize build-to-order Macs with the app. Previously, you could only use the app to purchase stock hardware configurations; but customers craving more RAM, additional pre-installed software, or upgraded hard drives no longer need to fire up their Web browsers, as the updated Apple Store app can now handle such upgrades.

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Touch Press, the company behind beloved iPad launch title The Elements, has launched another gem of a book/app hybrid called Gems and Jewels.

The Elements, unsurprisingly, focused on showcasing each element on the Periodic Table, offering an immersive experience that Touch Press calls “revolutionary.” The company followed up The Elements with Solar System, and now turns more terrestrial with Gems and Jewels. Fear not; while sticks and stones may break your bones, Gems and Jewels make you look cool.

Touch Press built Gems and Jewels in partnership with the University of Chicago Press and the Field Museum of Natural History, assembling 360-degree images of 300 sparkly stones for your perusal. You can rotate, examine, and zoom in on every last gem.

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In the ancient days before Google or Bing or Wikipedia, the Encyclopaedia Britannica was just about the definitive source of information on a wide range of topics. If your family didn't own a set—and they were expensive, so you probably didn't—you could just bicycle down to the library for some help on your school report.

These days, all you have to do is fish around in your pocket. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia 2011, the latest version of the encyclopedia app for both the iPhone and iPad, is now available for download from the App Store. The app gives you offline access to more than 25,000 articles and 2,700 images that cover, in the developer’s words, “just about every aspect of human endeavor”—ranging from art to history to geography and more.

The app also includes an On This Day feature highlighting historic events on the calendar, as well as the ability to share articles via e-mail. In addition, you can look back at the last 100 articles you've viewed. The merely curious can shake their iPhone or iPad, and a random article will appear.

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