In our recent Where To? 5.0 update, we introduced an API that lets other apps use Where To? to search for places nearby or at any given location.

Now, we’ve sighted the first two apps implementing the API in the wild: 😉

Launch Center Pro

Launch Center Pro by App Cubby allows to define shortcuts for various actions in all kinds of apps, system apps as well as apps from the App Store. For instance, you can launch Tweetbot right to the compose window or to view your DMs.

Adding a Where To? shortcut to Launch Center Pro is easy:

• In the Action Composer, select Where To?, then either “Launch Where To?” for just opening the app or “Search” to type in a “Name” and a “Query”.
• “Query” can be any category or brand in Where To? or just a free search term. For instance, I used “Any Restaurant” as the query for the “Food” shortcut. “Starbucks” and “Bank of America” use the same term as the query.
• Finally you may want to customize the icon by selecting different background colors and icons.

Where To? will automatically search for the specified query term at your current location. If you want to search at a particular custom location, you can append ”&location=x.xx,x.xx” to the predefined URL, where x.xx,x.xx is the latitude,longitude of the location.

Thanks to @drbarnard for the super-quick addition to Launch Center Pro!

Objective-Cologne

Objective-Cologne is the companion app for the upcoming Cocoa/Objective-C conference in Cologne. Besides the classic ingredients of a conference app (schedule, speaker introductions) it offers background information about the location.

Using the Where To? API, hotels, public transport stations, restaurants and bars in the surrounding of the conference venue can be searched. “Location Details” opens the conference venue itself in Where To? which comes in handy to get turn-by-turn driving directions using 3rd party navigation apps, to call them or to share the location via email, text or social networks.

The app automatically detects whether Where To? is installed and offers to download it from the App Store if not.

Btw: If you’re a Cocoa developer in Europe and have a free slot on Sept. 11-12, be sure to check out ObjCGN! I’ll hold a talk there as well, about “UIAppearance – possibilities and beyond”, and I’m sure it’s gonna be a lot of fun! Thanks to my friend & coworker @StuFFmc for the API integration!

Your App!

Please feel free to support the Where To? API in your own app and let us know. We’ll continue to showcase well made integrations here.