The most rewarding part of traveling is often discovering the hidden gems of a city—alleyways lined with street art, the perfect spot to watch a sunset, a camera shop stocked with vintage lenses. The new location-based iOS app Trover makes it possible for users to share or find what it calls Discoveries—photos of and information about noteworthy sites and activities in any given place.
For example, if you're in downtown San Francisco, you can see Discoveries for Rayko Photo Center's photo gallery, an iron sculpture of a man sleeping on W Hotel's roof, garlic fries from Bar 888, and a number of places to find graffiti art.
Co-founders Rich Barton and Jason Karas created Trover to provide a personalized, crowd-sourced travel guide where you can get tips from friends, people you trust, or just locals who know a place best. Like photo-sharing app Instagram, Trover users can take photos within the app, follow one another, and browse through other users' uploaded Discoveries. Trover is much more than just images; you are also required to include a brief description and the location of an image. The app pinpoints them on a built-in Google map, making it easy for users to get directions to what's captured in the photo.
U.S. News & World Report unveiled U.S. News Weekly, its new iPad app, at midnight ET Thursday. The free app includes access to a single issue; subscriptions cost $1 per month.
This marks the U.S. News & World Report’s first foray into the App Store, and the company has clearly spent time creating an immersive iPad magazine experience. You’re able to access the current issue, along with any past issues you’ve paid for. (You can continue to access old issues you received even if you let your subscription lapse.) The app adjusts its layout as you switch between portrait and landscape modes, and works equally well in both.
Apple's iPad continues to reign as the top-selling tablet in China while rival Android devices from Motorola, Lenovo, and Asus struggle to gain a sizeable presence in the country's market, according to a Beijing-based research firm.
A total of 1.4 million tablets were sold in China during the second quarter, with 74 percent of those sales for Apple's iPad devices, according to Analysys International.
Apple's iPad 2, which went on sale in China in May, made up 53 percent of total tablet sales. About half of those sales came from official channels, while the rest came from unauthorized resellers, said Sun Peilin, an analyst with Analysys International.
iOS 5’s on-device delta updates can’t come soon enough. Just a week and a half after releasing iOS 4.3.4, Apple has dropped iOS 4.3.5. Apple says that the new update fixes a security vulnerability with certificate validation.
The recently released iOS 4.3.4 focused on patching PDF vulnerabilities that some folks were using to jailbreak their devices, but could be exploited for more nefarious means, too.
Editor’s Note: The following article is reprinted from Network World.
Law firm Bursor & Fisher wants AT&T customers to help it stop the AT&T-T-Mobile merger and is using the prospect of a $10,000 arbitration payment to bring people onboard.
The firm has set up a website, fightthemerger.com, aimed at recruiting AT&T customers whom the firm claims will be adversely affected by the proposed merger. The firm claims that it has already initiated “dozens” of arbitrations on behalf of clients and it says that if its arbitration efforts are successful, “we may be able to seek a $10,000 payment for every one of our customers.”
Several prominent iOS-based e-reading apps received updates on Monday that removed one small, but important feature: To comply with Apple's latest policies on selling app content outside of the standard in-app purchasing API, the Kindle, Kobo, Google, and Nook apps all dropped in-app links to their Web-based ebook stores. And at least one significant e-reader has disappeared from the store entirely.
Specifically, the apps now comply with Apple's App Store requirement for purchasing external content:
Apps can read or play approved content (specifically magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, and video) that is subscribed to or purchased outside of the app, as long as there is no button or external link in the app to purchase the approved content. (emphasis added)
Produce an avian-themed iPhone game, and you can expect people to let fly with the Angry Birds comparisons. That would be unfair to Air Penguin, a $1 game for the iPhone and iPod touch from Gamevil. Yes, the game features birds—penguins, to be precise—and they do seem a little bit miffed about the polar ice caps melting (Perturbed Penguins?). But this is an entirely different kind of casual offering for the iPhone, a scrolling platform game instead of a physics-based puzzler.
Air Penguin also goes for a completely different control scheme. Instead of on-screen buttons or touch controls, Air Penguin relies entirely on the iPhone’s built-in accelerometer to control the action. It’s this feature that will either delight iPhone gamers or have them angrily pressing down on the Air Penguin logo so that they can remove the game from their devices.
I Was Not Aware There Would Be Sharks: it’s hard enough to get your Air Penguin from one ice floe to the next. You also have to contend with obstacles like penguin-eating sharks.
