Know before you go. Get detailed turbulence forecasts for your exact route, now available 5 days in advance.
With the recent announcement of Facebook Places, it seems like Apple thought it was about time to showcase location apps in the App Store. So here it is, an “On The Grid” section [iTunes link] that lists apps such as Facebook, Gowalla, Foursquare and Twitter. The only paid app in this new section is GeoFences.
Check out “On the Grid - Location-based Apps” here.
Another week, another new “App Store Essentials” section for iPhone users. This time around the folks over at the App Store team have collected “the most positively engaging and altogether difficult games available” - the list includes gems such as Chaos Rings, Archetype and Space Invaders Infinity Gene.
You can check out the section in iTunes here.
In my attempt of achieving the perfect paperless office, I tried a large number of OCR (optical character recognition) apps for Mac over time. For those of you not familiar with OCR, it’s a technology that scans any kind of document starting from a good-quality photo and extracts text from it. Text you can edit and save, no matter the language or characters used in the document. On the Mac, I settled with Prizmo, an amazingly powerful and good-looking app by Creaceed which can scan and organize your documents.
Last week Creaceed released the first iPhone version of Prizmo, which sports the same beautiful UI as the Mac counterpart and aims at becoming the ultimate OCR solution for iPhone users. I tested the app, and threw some documents in its database. Has the paperless office really gone mobile? Read more below to find out.
Stuart Dredge over at Mobile Entertainment created a very insightful presentation showing all the details behind the mobile app market. The App Store, Ovi Store, Android Marketplace, Palm App Catalogue: everything’s in there, by the numbers.
If you want to know how many apps are available in which store, what kind of apps and how many paid apps people buy each month, check out the presentation below (sorry, it’s Flash). [TUAW via Mobile Ent]
Seriously, there must be something wrong over at the App Review Team. Perhaps a new guy was hired to replace Mr. Shoemaker? No, because the latest App Store rejection really beats all the other ones we’ve posted over the years. Read It Later 2.2 (our iPad coverage here) was submitted for approval a few days ago, and Apple rejected it because an app “can’t require user registration prior to allowing access to the app’s content”. If you’re app is account-based (Read It Later, or Twitter, or Facebook), it can’t go through.
Either we’re reading the rejection letter wrong, or Apple messed up this time. Check it out below.
Oh, Shoemaker - what are you doing? First you forget to tell the world (and Steve) about your iWiz accomplishments, and now you approve Nintendo rip-offs in the App Store? What’s going on?
This is a good one. Really, could you imagine that App Store director Phillip Shoemaker, the guy who’s in charge of accepting and rejecting apps, sells his own fart and urination simulator apps in the App Store?
Last night Cody published his thoughts on iTunes and wireless syncing to devices, a matter we’ve been discussing here at MacStories for a long time. I agree with him (though I’m really not into podcasts as he is), but I want to follow-up by focusing on a secondary point: the App Store navigation.
Google is copying Apple, but the App Store is broken. I can’t believe that after 2 years of existence Apple still hasn’t fixed many of the issues that affected the App Store back in 2008. In fact, they added even more.
Grooveshark have a history for not getting their official iPhone app quite right. First, they wanted to be able to do stuff like background music streaming when Apple wasn’t providing the API for that, and when the app was rejected, they decided to publish it on Cydia. It was even a good-looking app.
A few days ago the client was finally released in the App Store. Now, the app is no longer available.
