Waze, the popular social-mapping location data startup, today pushed a major update to its GPS, maps and social traffic application in the App Store.
Featuring a refreshed design and cleaner maps with emphasis on safer driving, the new Waze 4.0 for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad also brings reduced battery consumption allowing the app to run longer in the background, and much more.
Foursquare's dedicated check-in app, Swarm, has been adding missing features ever since the startup split the main mobile app's functionality into dedicated place discovery and check-in apps.
The new Swarm 3.0 for iOS, which released earlier this morning, brings back leaderboards after gaining mayorships early in the summer. In addition, messages and notifications have been unified under a single inbox view.
Your worldwide and nearby views are now folded into a single Friends tab and a revamped Here Now section is now located under the Nearby section.
Following an update last month that added expanded search options to its mobile app, Facebook-owned Instagram has now started rolling out place search and other search-related enhancements for its web version, the company announced Monday.
The new search features are currently rolling out to a subset of Instagram's installed base before going live for everyone so they may not be available to you just yet.
Skype for iPhone has picked up the ability to share a location with others in its latest update in the App Store.
The Microsoft-owned VoIP program was bumped to version 5.14 Monday to make it trivial to share your current geographical location, or your favorite place, with friends and family using the paperclip icon in the chat window. Moreover, this edition of Skype introduces unspecified improvements.
The new version of Skype arrived hot on the heels of a recent update which brought out handy web link previews in the chat window and replying with dictation on Apple Watch.
Foursquare unveiled Swarm in March of last year to give the location check-in ability of the main iOS app a brand new place of its own. Not all of the features of Foursquare for iOS have made it into the dedicated app, namely mayorships.
Arguably the most popular feature—especially if you're into the check-in game—mayorships are now back in the latest Swarm 2.5 for iPhone update.
You can earn them by checking in more than anyone else, which will unlock a shiny new mayor crown.
Apple appears to have quietly acquired San Francisco-based GPS firm Coherent Navigation, MacRumors reported on Sunday. Several of the company's employees, including the CEO and co-founders, all started working for the iPhone-maker in recent months, and its domain servers were recently updated to point to Apple.
Among Coherent's technology is something called High Integrity GPS, which offers greater accuracy and precision and higher signal integrity versus standard GPS. It accomplishes this by combining signals from both mid-earth orbiting GPS satellites low-earth satellites used by data provider Iridium for voice and data.
Swarm, Foursquare's dedicated location check-in application for the iPhone, received a nice little update Monday, adding the Apple Watch component which allows you to easily check in to places and see who’s nearby.
This is especially handy considering that Foursquare's main iPhone and Apple Watch app lacks this functionality as it's now focused on finding places to eat, drink and visit.
Waze, a crowdsourced GPS, maps and traffic service owned by Google, has refreshed its iPhone and iPad application with a few new features.
Now available at no cost in the App Store, the new Waze 3.9.4 is much faster than before. More importantly, it has added a cool new feature which tells you how long you'll be stuck in a traffic jam.
Other features like navigation, route select and re-routing have been sped up significantly, an important feat given that you'll be using the app while driving.
Foursquare, the world's top crowd-sourced local search and discovery service and mobile app, has pushed a refresh to its iPhone and iPad places-discovery application available at no cost in the App Store.
Among other new features, Foursquar 8.1 enables Handoff support between iOS and the Mac and lets you easily access Citymapper from the app. For those wondering, Citymapper is a fast-growing, real-time transit service available on the iPhone and coming to the Apple Watch next month.
You will be soon able to tag specific locations in tweets thanks to an expanded Foursquare integration, the micro-blogging platform announced in a tweet Monday.
“We're working with Foursquare so you can tag specific locations in tweets,” reads the message. The new features is “coming soon,” added the firm.
Currently, users can add additional location context to their tweeting by adding a general location label, such as “SoMa, San Francisco," to their tweets using Twitter for Android, Twitter for iOS, twitter.com or other mobile apps.
Waze, a popular crowdsourced GPS, maps and traffic service, announced on Wednesday that it's rolling out AMBER alerts in the United States.
Realized through a partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the move brings AMBER alerts to Waze users when a child in their area has been abducted or gone missing.
Coming as a free upgrade for all existing owners of the $0.99 ETA app for the iPhone and iPad, Melbourne based developer Eastwood shared last week a preview of what ETA's Watch counterpart will look like.
For those unfamiliar with ETA, it's a GPS-based personal driving assistant which calculates travel times and driving directions to all your favorite destinations.
The ETA app for the Apple Watch will provide the same basic functionality as the iOS edition, only optimized for the smaller screen, allowing Watch owners to get travel times and driving directions just by raising their wrist.