The Week in iOS Apps: What a Crock

What a Crock!

If you are a lover of slow-cooked foods, we have the finest-ever iOS app ever created, just for you this week.

Crock-Pot Recipes

If your household is anything like mine, you'll probably agree that the $4 Crock-Pot Recipes app for iPhone and iPad--the first official Crock-Pot cooking app!--is the finest, most-anticipated offering in the App Store's history. And every month, you can make an in-app purchase of new recipe collections, meaning this is a cookbook that never goes stale.

Digisocial

Think of the free Digisocial as a talking Instagram. You take photos, add effects, and upload them to Facebook and Twitter--but you can add voice commentary to each of your photo uploads.

Fly Delta

Delta Airlines has brought its free Fly Delta app to the iPad. The "Glass Bottom Jet" feature lets you see photos of the area you're flying over, and you can alter travel arrangements, upgrade flights, and even download the in-flight magazine.

Inaugural 2013

The free Inaugural 2013 app for iPhone is built mainly for people who will be in Washington D.C. to attend President Obama's swearing-in ceremony on Monday--it lists a schedule of events and alerts to nearby happenings. It also includes a live feed of these events as they happen, so out-of-towners can keep up.

Merge Records

ReaddleDocs has become Documents by Readdle ... Dolphin Browser for iPad now lets users clip items directly to Evernote ... Rolling Stone is finally available on the iPad.

Read more »

Nokia debuts Here, cross-platform location service

Nokia plans an ambitious expansion of its mapping and location-based services platform beyond its own smartphones to competing devices running OSes other than Windows Phone 8, it said Tuesday.

The move is being backed with the acquisition by Nokia of Earthmine, a California-based provider of street-level 3D imaging data, and will see Nokia going head-to-head with Google, Apple and dedicated mapping companies like TomTom.

"We want to give everyone with any type of device to ability to use this, the best location platform in the industry," said Stephen Elop, CEO of Nokia, speaking at an event in San Francisco.

Nokia will use the "Here" brand name across its location platform.

The company hopes that by expanding its platform beyond its own handsets, it will benefit from the greater scale of the service and in turn make its own service better.

Nokia has already taken some steps towards opening up its mapping database. It has worked with car navigation system makers and other IT companies including Amazon and Oracle to license its maps, said Elop.

"We will do much, much more of this," he said.

(More to come.)

Martyn Williams covers mobile telecoms, Silicon Valley and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Martyn on Twitter at @martyn_williams. Martyn's e-mail address ismartyn_williams@idg.com

Read more »

Bank of America to challenge Square, Verifone in mobile payments

Bank of America Merchant Services will extend its mobile payments service to small retailers in December, allowing them to use smartphones and tablets as point-of-sale terminals.

The entry of the country's largest processor of electronic payments into the small-retailer sector of the market further endorses use of phones as payment terminals and will mean stiffer competition for existing players like Square and Verifone.

Bank of America's Mobile Pay on Demand service will be available from Dec. 3 and will be compatible with Android and Apple iOS devices. The bank will supply a credit card reader and an application that are installed on the retailers' mobile devices.

Targeted at businesses that process only a few credit card payments each day, the Bank of America service will charge retailers 2.7 percent for swiped-card Visa, Mastercard and Discover purchases and 3.5 percent plus $0.15 for transactions where the card number is keyed in. American Express processing is also supported at fees ranging from 2.3 percent to 3.5 percent.

Competitor Square, which popularized the sector when it launched an iPhone payment device in October 2010, charges 2.75 percent per transaction or a $275-per-month flat fee with no transaction charges.

Retailers that sign up before the end of the year will get a yearlong subscription to iDeals Marketing Platform Pro. The service allows businesses to publish simple websites and through them offer discounts and loyalty programs to customers.

If a customer wants to take advantage of a discount or collect loyalty points, they link their credit card to an iDeals account. When the card is swiped, it's matched with the customer's iDeals account and the discount applied or the loyalty point awarded. At launch, the discount will be applied later in the form of a credit back to the card. Later, it's hoped that the offer will be applied immediately.

The same platform also allows retailers to push out offers to social media and deals platforms like Bing Deals and 8 Coupons.

At launch, the Bank of America service will only pull credit card data from the magnetic strip on the cards.

A rival, Verifone, launched a payment device for smartphones and tablets last week that is compatible with the "chip and PIN" credit cards that are in use in many countries. Chip and PIN has become the dominant technology in Europe and relies on a smartcard credit card and personal identification number rather than a signature.

The new Bank of America service is for in-person payments. A similar service, Mobile Pay Business, is already offered by the bank for retailers that process many payments per month in person, by mail and by phone.

Bank of America Merchant Services is a joint venture of Bank of America and First Data, the largest electronics payment network operator.

Martyn Williams covers mobile telecoms, Silicon Valley and general technology breaking news forThe IDG News Service. Follow Martyn on Twitter at @martyn_williams. Martyn's e-mail address ismartyn_williams@idg.com

Read more »

The Week in iOS Apps: A better Facebook

This week's roundup of iOS apps offers new ways to shop, track your life, and make new websites. Already this week we brought you news of the Angry Birds Star Wars game, word of updates to theClear and FreshBooks apps, as well as the announcement that Microsoft Office may finally be available on iOS in 2013.

Here are other new and updated apps that caught our eye this week.

Apple Store: Siri: Buy me a new iPad mini! OK, so we're not sure that gadget shopping will be quite that easy, but the latest update to the Apple Store app for iPhone does let you use Siri to shop around and compare prices on Apple products. (Of course, you'll have to have a Siri-enabled device--an iPhone 4S or 5, or a third- or fourth-generation iPad--to take advantage of the new features.) The updated app also lets you buy gift cards and have them emailed to friends from within the app--and those cards can even be loaded into the recipients Passbook. Apple's technology has finally found its best purpose: To make it really easy for you to buy more of Apple's technology.

Evernote: This free app for iPhone and iPad--which lets you save pictures, notes, and clippings from just about everything that you read or experience--has long been one of the best-selling offerings in the App Store. Now it's received a massive overhaul to its user interface, with a new homepage that allows easier access to notes, notebooks, tags, and premium features. (On the iPad, there's also homepage access to your most recent notes.) And the note list has been reconfigured to a "card style" to showcase the content therein. What's more, geotagged notes can be displayed on a map to show when and where you collected them.

Facebook/Tumblr: Facebook's free app for iPhone and iPad hasn't always been popular--and the company's inability to "get" the mobile arena has arguably hindered its success on the stock market--but this week's update has some notable improvements, making it easier to find friends online and chat them up immediately (see the photo at top), along with the improved ability to share multiple photos quickly. Elsewhere in social media, the Tumblr iPhone app has also been updated, bringing a new dashboard and gesture-based navigation. Telling people way too much about yourself is easier than ever.

Petfinder Mobile: How much is that doggie on my iPhone? (Arf, arf!) I browsed to its waggly tail! How much is that doggie on my iPhone? (Arf, arf!) I can share its details via Facebook, Twitter, or email!

Summly: This free news aggregator app for iPhone really boils down the news, offering 400-character summaries of the top stories in the subject areas you choose. (You can click on the story and go more in-depth with the longer articles from the source.) Version 2.0, launched this week, addressed user complaints with a thorough overhaul of the navigation, cleaning up story lists.

Webr/Zapd: You probably don't need convincing that the iPhone is a content-creation machine, but here are two more reminders. Version 2.0 of Webr, a website-making app, lets users add video and audio links to their sites; it also offers new themes and the ability to create and manage up to three websites. Version 2.0 of Zapd, a similar offering, now lets you collaborate with other users in website creation, and offers new website themes, with additional themes being added every month.

Other apps of note: Reeder for iPhone now lets users post to App.Net and Quote.FM ... the best-selling novel War Horse is now available as a standalone multimedia iPad app, as is Goodnight Moon, the beloved children's classic ...  and Scanner Pro now lets users batch-upload multiple images to their account.

Read more »