I’m delighted to present you another major Where To? update! We’ve been working on it for many months and I hope you’ll enjoy what’s new in it:

Favorites

You’re now able to mark your favorite places. Be it the yummiest restaurant, the trustworthiest doctor or the most reliable car repair shop, by saving them as a favorite you can find those places later easily.

There are two ways to favorite a place: Right in the map using the Favorite button on the left side of the bubble and on the newly designed Details page that we’ll see in a minute.

Under the Favorites tab you can now choose from favorite categories and favorite places. Favorite places are sorted by distance as usual.

iCloud

When using multiple Apple devices, favorites and settings are synced via iCloud: A favorite place, set on the iPhone, is automatically available on the iPod touch or another iPhone.

Menus

Have an advance peek on a restaurant’s menu to easily judge whether your favorite food is being served and whether the price range is acceptable! Or when waiting to be seated, you can already make the choice! Hundreds of thousands US restaurants are included.

Revamped details page

The new toolbar on the bottom side contains the most often used actions like calling the phone number, adding to the address book, setting as a favorite and sharing to friends and family.
Speaking of sharing: when sharing the place via email or Facebook, the recipient can now open the place right within Where To? – handy to view all the details and to start a navigation right away!

Improved directions apps support

Where To? was the first app of its kind to work together with turn-by-turn navigation apps and detects installed navigation apps on the user’s device. In this version we added “iGo primo”, “VZ Navigator” (US) and “Gokivo” (US) to support a total of 12 different apps now.

The suitable app can be selected via a nifty little popover that displays the supported apps for the current country. Apps that are not currently installed on the device can be downloaded from the App Store by tapping the green arrow button. Unneeded apps can be removed from Where To? (not from the device of course) in jiggle mode like on your home screen. Tapping the “Restore” button adds all removed icons again.

If you prefer one specific app, just tap “Set Preferred” in jiggle mode, then select your preferred app. This app will be started right away when long-tapping the directions button.

The Where To? API

As a developer we love collaborating with other apps such as launching navigation apps for directions. But so far, Where To? wasn’t open to other developers in a similar way. That has changed in 5.0.

Where To? now can be launched from third party apps for various use cases:

• Search for a name or category nearby the current user location: For example, an online banking app could integrate a bank branch search or a cooking app for Mediterranean dishes could link to Italian, Greek etc. restaurants nearby.
• Search for a name or category at a custom geo location: For example, a conference app could integrate a search for hotels, bars, etc. around the conference venue.
• Open the details page for a specific place: A museum app or any other app that involves a physical location could link to the location’s entry in Where To? to make it easy to review the place within Where To? or to get directions using any of the 12 different navigation apps Where To? supports.

All the details are available on our Where To? API documentation page. We’re curious what other developers will come up with and will highlight interesting apps in this blog! If you’re a developer and miss a certain API, please let us know!

A ton of small changes

As always there are many small changes and bug fixes (thanks to all of you who’ve reported them!) under the hood. I’d like to highlight just two of them:

• The Augmented Reality module “Where To? 3D” now comes with a more reactive orientation control on iPhone 4 and 4S running iOS 5 or higher.
• Facebook authentication now opens the Facebook app if installed and you don’t have to type in your login details again.
• And visually impaired users using VoiceOver will appreciate that the distance and direction for all results are spoken in list mode.

We hope you’ll like the changes in Where To? 5.0 and download the update today! As always: Don’t forget to rate the app again since ratings are reset with every update. Thanks for your support!