Video: hidden iOS 8 Maps feature – Flyover City Tours

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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?