NameField

Hold up your phone and every shop, building and road around you gets its name, its distance and its direction, right on the camera. Works offline. No account needed.

Point your phone at the street and Name Field tells you what everything is called.

Shops, buildings, roads, stations, parks — each name appears on the camera view in the direction the place actually is, with how far away it is and what kind of place it is. The names come from OpenStreetMap, so it is not only the big landmarks: it is the bakery on the corner, the side street, the station exit.

HANDY WHEN

• You come up from a station exit with no idea which way you are facing • You are somewhere new and want to know what is actually around you • Someone says "it's just past the post office" and you need to spot the post office • You want to know which way home is, from anywhere

DISTANCES YOU CAN ACT ON

Distances are measured to the nearest point of the real shape — the wall in front of you, the edge of the road you are standing on — rather than to a centre point somewhere inside the block. So "3 m" means the road is three metres to your left, and "12 m" means that wall is twelve metres away. At walking range, that is the difference between a number you can use and one you cannot.

TAP ANYTHING TO SEE EVERYTHING

Tap a label, a map pin or a list row and you get everything the app knows: the measured distance and bearing, every name the place carries, and every OpenStreetMap tag behind it — opening hours, address, number of floors, step-free access, website. Web addresses and Wikipedia entries open in your browser.

THE SAME THING, SEEN FROM ABOVE

Switch to the map for what is around you, including what is behind you. Heading-up or north-up, with the radius drawn as a ring, the camera's real field of view shaded in, and the trail of where you have walked.

HOME, WORK AND PLACES YOU PIN

Save your home, your workplace or school, and anywhere else worth keeping. Pinned places are shown at any distance — home four kilometres away still gets a label pointing the way.

PHOTOS THAT REMEMBER WHERE YOU WERE

The shutter saves the camera image and the names together as one photo. Choose the shape — full screen, 16:9, 4:3 or square — and the quality, and the frame you are about to keep is drawn on screen before you press. Photos can carry the coordinate, its accuracy and the true direction the lens faced, so they land on the map in the Photos app pointing the way you were looking, and can carry a caption listing everything that was on screen. Both are switches you control.

KEEPS WORKING WITH NO SIGNAL

Place data is fetched much wider than you can see and topped up before it runs out, so a walk does not stop at the edge of the last download. Once an area has been fetched it keeps working with no signal at all. Changing the radius, the categories, the language or the units never waits for the network.

NO ACCOUNT NEEDED

No sign-in. Your pinned places and your walking trail stay on this phone. The only thing that leaves the device is a coordinate, sent to OpenStreetMap's public Overpass service to ask what is nearby.

WORTH KNOWING

At this range GPS accuracy is the limit — ten metres can be the shop next door — so the accuracy your phone reports is on screen at all times. Coverage comes from OpenStreetMap's volunteers: excellent in city centres, thinner in residential streets, where many buildings simply have no name recorded.

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence.

iPhone only. Requires a rear camera, location services and ARKit support. Works in landscape or portrait — your choice.