World Physical Atlas

World Physical Atlas is a small Windows application whose purpose is to help you gain access to a collection of maps from all over the world.

Simple layout

The GUI looks easy to work with so it can be handled by all types of users, regardless of their experience. The program makes a list with the available maps for all the continents, along with the major regions.

How it works

In order to access a map you only need to click on the preferred region. Returning to the main panel only implies a click on the map.
The program provides maps with the world (satellite and vegetation), sea depth, rivers and lakes, as well as city and country boundaries.
Although World Physical Atlas hasn’t been updated for a while, we have tested it on Windows 8.1 Pro and works without errors. It doesn’t eat up a lot of CPU and memory, so the overall performance of the computer is not hampered.

What it lacks

On the downside, you are not allowed to preview the maps in full screen mode, zoom in or out of the images, import photos from your personal collection, save pictures to your computer, and perform searches throughout the list so you can quickly identify an entry. If you maximize the main panel, the maps still remain small so it may prove to be quite difficult to observe the details.

Conclusion

All things considered, World Physical Atlas delivers a set of basic features for helping you view all sorts of maps, and is suitable especially for students. However, it still needs some enhancements so you can make use of more tools for analyzing maps.