We’re happy to announce MapBox for iPad version 1.3 is now available in the app store. This free app allows you to use and interact with your own KML and GeoRSS data on custom maps on the iPad. We’ve put a lot of work into this release, which brings some rather large new features, increased speed, and lots of small- and medium-sized fixes and enhancements.

At the top of the list is the new tile-based interactivity in our map creation studio TileMill that we recently blogged about. Interactivity lets you embed features such as place or region names, statistics, and other contextual information right into the map itself. Our iPad app now lets you explore these features by touching the map, and it works even when you have data overlays such as KML shown.

Another feature that we’re really happy with is presentation mode. On the new iPad 2, which supports hardware mirroring to an external display, MapBox for iPad will automatically detect when you have one attached and switch to presentation mode. It will show all finger touches to the iPad on the external screen so that your audience knows exactly what you are touching and referring to. We’ve open sourced this functionality and hope that it will benefit other iOS app developers as well.

We’ve made many other improvements to the app too. Here is just a sampling:

• Added a zoom button to help zoom to layers that specify their bounds

• Single-tap with two fingers to zoom out like Apple’s Maps app

• KML parsing improvements

• Increased visible latitude to full range available (-/+ 85.0511 degrees)

• Faster loading and smoother scrolling of maps

• No longer hard limit zooming to those in common to all active layers

• Visual improvements and updates

• Detail popup now pans with the map

• New, more detailed bundled tile set

• Reduced application size

• Memory leak and potential crash fixes

All in all, this is a huge update that we’re really proud of. Besides the feature improvements, we put a lot of work into some underlying issues and performance and really focused on a solid release to base our future feature work on. We hope that you enjoy it!

You can download the app here, and stay tuned, we’ll be blogging again soon about what’s next in the app pipeline.