Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Use Your iPhone to Get News Happening Around You

Let’s say you’re visiting a new city and are curious about local news, events, and other related information - where do you turn? You could pick up the local paper, toy around with Google Maps, or ask your Twitter friends, but you’re not guaranteed a complete view of what’s happening near you with any of those methods.


Now there’s a new option available to iPhone owners looking to simplify the process and turn to a single source for the complete local picture: Radar, powered by Outside.in is a brand new iPhone application that uses the devices’ GPS capabilities to locate you and display nearby news, blog posts, discussion threads, and tweets happening within 1,000 feet of your location.

radar iphone app


With Radar you can let the app serve up information related to your immediate locale, or create profiles for your home, office, and other places you frequent. It’s a neat idea with a few fun twists, including the ability to switch between the list view and the map view by shaking the phone. When using the map view, which is powered by Microsoft Virtual Earth, you’ll see location-aware icons based on the type of information available (ie. news stories or tweets) that you can select to drill down deeper into the information.


At $2.99, Radar could be a great resource for people needing hyperlocal information on the go, but this iPhone user found the new app to be a little buggy - for instance, I noticed a few issues while attempting to add new locations and navigate the map. If Outside.in can work out these kinks and find a way to pull in more hyperlocal content, it could be a very useful app worth buying.

0 comments:

Post a Comment