Yelp sneaks some augmented reality on your phone

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The new Yelp 3.0 app is pretty slick, with a handful of new features.  The best one, however, is undocumented — a very slick augmented reality view.

We talked about augmented reality a bit with the Wikitude app a few days ago, but Yelp is the first US-based one we’ve seen.  To access it on the app, shake the phone a few times and you’ll enable a feature called “the Monicle”.  This will show the world through your camera, and overlay locations of nearby restaurants, bars and other businesses.

It’s really more cool than useful, but it’s fun to play with.  Here’s a quick video that shows how to activate it:

I expect we’ll see many more of these types of apps in the near future, so it should be an exciting year.

Facebook 3.0 is now available!

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We’ve gone over the details before, and now this great update is available in the app store.

In addition, they’ve snuck in a few last-minute updates.  The two features that weren’t mentioned last week are landscape mode and home screen organizing.  I’m really glad to see the home screen organizing make it in there, as that’s a great feature to have.  Just hold down an icon on the home screen until they all start to shake (like on the iPhone home screen), drag to rearrange, then press the “done” button in the top left corner when you’re finished.  It works great!

You can download it from the app store here, or just get the update directly on your phone.  Once you have it, let us know what you think!

Boxcar 2.0 will be a must-have for social media junkies

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Boxcar 2.0 is now waiting in Apple’s submission queue, and the author expects it to be live sometime between September 3 and September 7.  What does boxcar do?

For Twitter, it can send you push notifications of anything you want — @replies, direct message, even for all of your tweets if you want (though that’d get a bit crazy for most people).

The new version also supports Facebook, allowing you to get notifications of all Facebook alerts.  The Facebook 3.0 app

won’t even have that, though it’s expected for Facebook 3.1 down the road.

Finally, it also has push notifications for email.  You tell your email account to forward everything to them (for notification purposes only), and it’ll keep you informed.

All in all, this should be a pretty sweet app.  It’s not free, but it’s reasonably cheap ($2.99).  Should be well worth it for most folks.  Look for it to come out in a few weeks.

Unblock Me Free

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This game is as simple as it gets.  Simply slide blocks up, down, left and right to reveal a path for the highlighted red block to make it through the hole and off the screen.  This free version has two modes, Relax and Challenge.  The only difference between the two modes are whether or not it records how many moves it took you to finish the level.  A good addition to this would be to have a timed mode.  This app originally started out with 400 levels but later added 200 more as a thank you and sorry for having bugs in an update.  I must say, with this many levels I thought there would be more alike and feel like im playing the same level over and over again but this is not the case.  Each level is a challenge.  One tip for the harder levels is to move the blocks into a position which makes it harder, only to have the ability to move other blocks out of the way for the win.  Overall a good free app that last longer than 15 minutes like most other free versions.

Wikitude app coming to iPhone soon

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One of the hottest category of apps we’ll see in the next year are is likely the Augmented Reality apps.  These are programs that allow you to look through your camera, and see the world beyond it with information overlays on it.  The possibilities of these kinds of apps are endless.

One of the first big AR apps due to come out for the iPhone is called Wikitude

.  They just released version 3.0 for Android today, and promise an iPhone app soon.

Here is their promo — slick, but superficial:

And here is a short demo of their app on Android to show how it works:

This app will allow you to log in using your Google, Twitter, Yahoo or OpenID account, after which you can add/edit content.  It should be pretty slick.

The app is due to launch after the iPhone 3.1 firmware is released, likely in the next month or two.

Chase Bank fully native app

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The new Chase Bank app is great.  From the main screen you can access account information, find atm/branch locations, and contact Chase.  Once you sign into your account, you can access all your accounts that are linked together online such as checking, savings, credit cards, and even mortgages!  From each account you can schedule credit card or mortgage payments and pay bills with the touch of a button.  You can transfer monies between accounts also.  Over all, this is very useful tool for the on-the-go person who needs account access at the touch of a button.

Chipotle app finally returns to the iPhone

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Back in January of this year, Chipotle released a pretty sweet iPhone app — you could order food right from your phone.  It seemed slick, but was removed from the app store just a few hours after it was released.  They had hoped to bring it back out in a few weeks, but it didn’t make it until today — seven months later.

Still, it’s been worth the wait.  If you enjoy Chipotle, the app is pretty slick.  You can order your food on there, customize it with various toppings, and pay for it using a Chipotle account that is tied to your credit card.

TechCrunch has a more lengthy review of the app, or just check out the screenshots below.

Evernote 3.1 released

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Evernote LogoEvernote 3.1 for the iPhone has been released, and it’s a very nice upgrade.  The update officially includes:

Massive speed improvements!
– Speedier snapshot note creation
– Much faster searching
– Clip web pages from the built-in web browser
– Add Evernote email address to iPhone contacts
– Manually sync your notes any time
– Lots of bug fixes

The part I like the best is the “speedier snapshot note creation”.  I take a lot of snapshot notes, and it was always very slow.  I can confirm that it’s much faster now.

No big new features here, but it’s a great little update to get!

Twitterfon Update

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The new Twitterfon update is out!  This new update fixes a few bugs in the search, posting of pictures, and followers page.

Twitterfon over all is a great application for setting up your Twitter account on the iPhone.  Ability to upload photos AND VIDEOS is awesome.  Have tried other apps and the video feature just doesn’t seem to cut it.  When uploading either, it gives you the option to choose from existing media or shoot video/photo.   You can also add your location via Google Maps to share with your friends.  I always find myself going back to this app when trying to upload a video to my tweets.

Wikipedia’s First App

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wikipedia_web_vs_app

Wikipedia is finally stepping into the App world with their own application for the iPhone.  After looking into it and seeing all it offers, it doesn’t seem that great.  The app isn’t much different than the mobile website that they offer.  It does offer a history search however, which is convenient when trying to reference an old search.   The only other benefit to having the app is direct access from your home screen instead of going to your bookmarks (if you had it bookmarked to begin with).  Over all not a very impressive app but not bad for just getting into the app scene for the iPhone.  You can check out the differences in the mobile web page and the app below.