What’s New in Version 3.0.1

3.0.1 includes bug fixes and improvements to the just-released Gowalla 3.

- fixed issues with creating a new spot
- improved the initial launch experience
- improved the speed and efficiency of location updates
- other text and design improvements

Now, I can't see how this app works yet because it's crashing as soon as I open it. This happened before with a previous release and I'm pretty sure it's because my iPhone is jailbroken. I've tried rebooting, reinstalling and doing as some have suggested, removing and re-adding my login info under the settings app. Still not working.

One last rant... I do not like the new icon. I'm just going to create my own winterboard theme for it and put the old one back. Yay for jailbreaking!
   

Changes

Gowalla 3 has been re-imagined from the ground up!

THINGS WE MADE NEW

+ New, Faster Check In: With a single tap, Gowalla intelligently predicts which spot you’re at based on your history. Start typing a message while your phone is locating you.

+ Share your check-ins with Facebook Places, Twitter, Foursquare and Tumblr.

+ Connect your Facebook and Foursquare accounts to see what all your friends are up to in one place!

+ Notes: Leave a personal message—anything from “Don’t forget the bottle of wine” to “The queso will make you glad to be alive”—for a friend. They’ll receive it the next time they check in at that location.

+ Add and browse Highlights for your city, like Best Cup, Family Night and My Happy Place.

+ Bookmark a spot to remember nearby favorites and faraway dreams.

+ Flag a Spot to report problems or closed locations while you’re on the go.

+ All-new drop-dead gorgeous design. We’ve re-imagined Gowalla and made it more beautiful and easy to use than ever.

THINGS WE MADE BETTER

+ Upload a photo from your Photo Library
+ Creating a Spot is easier and more accurate, with smart searching for possible duplicates.
+ Browsing friends is much improved, including the ability to search any friends list.

Take it for a spin, tell your friends, and let us know what you think on Twitter (@gowalla).

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Available In: App Store

Price: Free

Announcement from Gowalla.com

Over the last 6 months we’ve been working on something very, very special.

Without further ado, I’m stoked to announce Gowalla 3, the most significant update to the service we’ve ever released—both in terms of design and utility. But before I dive into the specifics of new features, let’s dive straight into the feature that is sure to be the most talked about.

Gowalla is now the easiest and best way to keep up with your friends across services with a combined activity tab that merges the whereabouts of your Gowalla, Facebook and Foursquare friends. Additionally, Gowalla now supports checking in on both Facebook Places and Foursquare in addition to sharing with both Twitter and Tumblr.

In fact, we’ve made checking in at your favorite places even easier with a new, faster check-in interface. We debated calling this “quick” or “express” check in, but it doesn’t really need a gimmicky name. We just made it better. Simply tap the Check In button that is universally present in the tab bar and based on your previous history and current location, we’ll auto-fill where we think you are. We get it right about 80 percent of the time. In the cases where our best guess was a little off, it’s super easy to select the correct location with a couple quick taps. Then you can quickly and easily share where you are with your friends on Gowalla, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Tumblr.

Of course, one of the things we hear often from our community is how much they love the Gowalla experience—which is certainly evidenced by our recent announcement with Disney Parks—but they want to keep up with their friends on Foursquare and Facebook Places as well. We decided that this was a problem we could solve.

Today you can now connect both your Facebook and Foursquare accounts in order to keep up with friends across multiple services. We’ve combined them all into a single, connected activity feed with all your friends, regardless of the service they checked in on.

In addition to adding your friends’ Facebook and Foursquare check-ins to your activity feed, we’ve also made it easier to preview the photos your friends are taking with Gowalla on the fly. It’s a lot more fun.

Of course, we’ve added several new and improved features to Gowalla 3 as well.

You’ll notice that our Highlights feature is now baked into Spots pages on the iPhone. You can view the Highlights that have been added to a spot in addition to adding your own. And in addition to our own Highlights, you can even read tips from Foursquare if they’re present at that location.

Next, we’ve added a fantastic new feature called Bookmarks. You can use a bookmark to flag a favorite spot — or perhaps just a spot you wish to visit in the future. You can quickly pull back up your bookmarked spots from the Spots tab. We even use bookmarks to help us determine where you are when you use the improved check in feature. We think you’ll find this very handy.

Finally, I’d like to tell you about my favorite feature. It’s called Notes.

With Gowalla 3 you can leave a Note for a specific friend (or for yourself) at any location. They’ll receive it the next time they check in there. Use it to leave a menu recommendation (the queso will make you feel alive!), to welcome someone to your city, as a reminder for yourself (don’t forget the bottle of wine) or even to leave a love note for someone special.

You can leave a Note at any spot from the mobile app and also from the web as well.

This is just the highlight reel of what you’ll find in Gowalla 3. A refreshing design, better spot creation and management tools, and improved friend management features are also neatly tucked into this update.

You can download Gowalla 3 for iPhone today at iTunes. Gowalla 3 for Android, iPad and Blackberry are coming soon!

One of the best hacks for the iPhone, SBSettings, now works with firmware 4.0. This hack let’s you swipe the status bar and a drop down menu pops out with all kinds of quick settings like brightness adjustment and toggles for wifi, bluetooth and 3G. There are different themes, all kinds of info like running processes, IP address, & memory. Best of all, it’s free. This is a must have app!

See our past reviews of SBSettings for more detailed descriptions.

Note: there is a small bug for 4.0.

ATTENTION 4.0 USERS: Currently an activator bug prevents the SBSettings window from appearing in some apps. For the time being, load settings, activator, and set SBSettings also to short hold home so you can hold home button to also bring up sbsettings in apps.

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Video

Description

Welcome to convenience! Move your important toggles directly into Springboard where they are always available instantly even while other apps are running.

Note: This does not come with an icon. You can swipe the statusbar to bring down the main window. You can configure in activator settings other methods of opening the SBSettings window. Customize it to your liking!

Known 4.0 Issues
- Activator issue with swiping statusbar. Configure an alternate method to launch app in apps in settings app.
- Phone toggle not working well. Looking into it.
- The rest is working well.

Changelog

3.1.0

- Fix: 3.1.0-1 solves theoretical crash of more app that no one reported, but could in some cases.
- Fix: Fixed the iOS4 3g crashing in hidden icons, dock, and folders.
- Fix: Re-added iOS4 rotation sensing (found another way to do it!). Window rotates again.
- Fix: Redid the more-app GUI to use a standardized apple style interface.
- New: Added global activator launch settings for SBSettings window to more app. You can also get to these in settings app.

What’s New

* Hourly forecast
* 7-day forecast
* Severe weather map
* Weather alert window
* Shows wind and precipitation icons on map
* Remembers last 10 locations
* Turn on/off animations on slow networks
* Turn on/off personal weather stations
* Lots of other enhancements and a few bug fixes

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Now I don’t use Skype that much so this is kinda kewl. I only really use it to talk to a friend in Brazil every couple months. I sure some of you use it on a daily basis. So, let’s find out!

- Run Skype in the background with multitasking in iOS4.
- Receive Skype calls and IM while other apps are running or when your iPhone is locked.
- You can also continue your call while you switch to another application.
- Multitasking is available only with iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS.

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Facebook has put out another update with some fixes to a couple things that have really been annoying me. One is video playback! You can now watch videos posted on Facebook. Another is links to photo albums now work. Before it would just give an error. Also, you can upload .png files. This helps us upload screenshots from our iPhones. Before you would just get a black screen instead of the picture. Here’s the full list of updates:

New features in this version:

- You can now watch Facebook videos.
- You can now view and write on walls of events.
- Uploaded photos are now 720px wide.

This version contains fixes for the following bugs:

- Could not comment on photos accessed from Notifications
- Could not upload photos smaller than a certain size
- No more than 2 notifications were highlighted as unread
- Status updates appeared out of order in News Feed
- Broken photo album links in News Feed
- Birthdays view had months in wrong order
- Last section of friend list was incomplete if you had fewer than 8 friends
- Notes with non-ASCII text were cut off at the end

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Gowalla

- Design: A fresh new experience that is more flexible, readable and usable than ever
- Photos: Upload a photo after checking in, browse photos from friends and see photos taken at a spot.
- Checkin Commenting: When a friend checks in someplace awesome, tell them what you think!
- Multiple checkin messages: Skipped typing a checkin message? Come back and add one.
- Hot Spots: Discover the most popular spots nearby
- Browse your friends… and friends of friends.
- Browse friends’ bookmarked spots and created trips.
- More ways to get in touch with Facebook, Twitter and web links for friends.
- Spot details (when available): address, phone number, Twitter name, Facebook page, website

Price: Free

foursquare

- Brand new look and feel!
- Faster, more efficient checkin and shout flow
- “Places” view now supports categories
- Easily see a history of places you’ve been
- Pull-to-refresh

Price: Free

Loopt

-Friend Map has its own tab thanks to your feedback (got more feedback? e-mail feedback@loopt.com)
-Loopt Pulse is even better at helping you plan your next move with new Events info from Metromix, ZVents, and SonicLiving
-Listen to music clips from concert Events and RSVP to see who else is going on Facebook!
-Search for Events and Places by date and distance around you, your friends, or specific places
-Share button on Events and Places to share them with friends

Price: Free

aclevelandjr: Awesome app but it erased my entire Google contacts list and I can’t get them to sync back… Beware!!!!!

DMB Fan 36: I’m happy to see a walk into new frontiers, but this address book sync thing seems to miss the mark in two basic places:

1) Facebook Links are sent over the contacts labeled as the default “Homepage” not a URL field called something more user friendly like “Facebook”. (the API let’s you do this easily)

2) Contact pictures are sent in a very small resolution! A picture with a quality of at least the iPhone screen res should be used instead. Most facebook contact photos have a nice higher res picture behind them. When a phone call comes in or goes out you get a silly little postage stamp instead of a nice full screen image like pictures chosen on the phone itself.

Tigger H.: Great concept, poor execution. The new “sync” feature decided to sync random facebook users I am not even friends with to difference phone contacts of mine.. Some profile pictures are on more then one contact.. Many contacts facebooks are not even remotely close to being theirs… I just wish i did not touch that sync button….

D4VIDS: I just updated my facebook and hit the sync friends button…big mistake!!! Now my fb won’t even load and it keeps crashing. Not a very good update

A new update (3.1.1) claims to have fixed bugs when syncing with contacts but there are still features missing like video playback and I still have to swipe and delete messages in my inbox twice to get rid of them. Another thing to note about the push notification, it just tells you there is a new message, but it doesn’t push the actual message.

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Other updates include: “Fixes issue with night setting not working unless ‘Use Local Time’ is set.” and “Compatibility with WeatherIcon Plugin 1.0.1.” The fix came out on December 23rd so some of you probably already have it. Let me know if it worked for you.

The official Flickr app has always been a let down for me. It’s missing some major features and made the app useless. There are still some features I’d like to see but I’ll post them at the end of this article. The new update adds two major features that should have always been there but props to the developer for finally getting them in there and for overall great UI design.

One of the new features now lets you upload more than one photo or video at a time. Although it’s a nice feature, the way it’s designed is not intuitive. You tap upload, select 1 picture, then it loads a screen to add info to that picture. To add another, tap “Add Item” and it brings you back to the camera roll. What’s annoying is if you are loading 10 picture from about 20 pictures ago, you have to do this for each one and have to scroll up each time because it loads at the bottom of the camera roll. Once you get them in, you can tap on each picture to edit the individual pictures info.

The other new feature allows you to edit already uploaded pictures. This is nice although you can only edit Title, Description, Tags, and Sets. Again, major problems here. When I upload pictures from my iPhone, the portrait ones show up as landscape and there is no setting to rotate them. It also doesn’t keep my geotag. It does allow you to use your current location as the geotag, but I’m not in the same place so it’s kinda pointless. It should pull the location from the exif data of the picture. Finally, it only loads about 20 of my sets when trying to select sets for the uploaded picture. I have many more and don’t have access to them as a choice.

I also had the app crash on me once and not load my pictures from my account.

Again, this app has beautiful UI design but is lacking in usability. Once these things are fixed, it will be a great app. Got any features you think are missing? Here’s mine: groups; slideshow at beginning be of my pics, not my contacts or give me choice; pinch and zoom for full size image; & notes. Share yours in the comments!