As of late, Yelp's iPhone app (iTunes link) has been on the cutting edge of new features on the social-rating service. The latest version, which rolled out as an update late Friday, is no exception.

Among the new features is the idea of "checking in" to a local businesses, which will let you alert your Yelp friends that you're there--complete with a push notification. Yelp will also reward repeat visitors by denoting them as "regulars," with the most often visiting party getting a special badge.

Sound familiar? You might have used Foursquare or Gowalla, which do most (or in Foursquare's case all) of these things.

That's not to say the idea of checking in is an unwelcome feature. It's giving businesses a new way to track Yelp user activity, something Yelp says could be encouraged through special rewards for its regular patrons. It's also containing Yelp's community within itself, and not just relying on external social networks like Twitter and Facebook, though as part of this release Yelp has added the option to blast out your check-ins to both.

Yelp is also doing Foursquare one better by putting your friends on a map--akin to Google's Latitude. This even works in Yelp's iPhone-only "monocle" mode, which uses the iPhone 3GS' camera to display restaurant locations (see a video of this). With the update it will now signal if a friend is at a certain location, as well as splitting the screen with a live map of the area.

Other new features include a way to invite people in your address book to Yelp. The app can also cross-reference your contact list to see if someone there is already on Yelp. Another big change is that the App now lets users edit all parts of their Yelp profile. In many ways, this signals that Yelp is finally getting comfortable with the fact that a good portion of its mobile users are likely accessing the site from just the app, and less so the main Yelp site.

Yelp's iPhone app continues to get the most attention of all its mobile apps, with the other platforms getting some of these cutting edge features a little later. A Yelp representative told CNET that the check-in system would be making its way onto other platforms in the near future, beginning first with Yelp's own site sometime next week. In the meantime, the company is working on getting the augmented reality monocle feature on Google's Android platform.

Originally posted at Web Crawler

If you've been following the latest Mac news, you already know that Apple is having a special event later this month. Most people believe that we will finally see the long-awaited Apple tablet--a multitouch device that's rumored to fall between the form factor of the iPod Touch and Apple's smallest MacBook laptops. Complete with touch-screen capabilities and rumored compatibility with iPhone apps, the new Apple tablet could be the mobile device a lot of people have been waiting for. Rick Broida wrote a post today saying iPhone OS 4.0 is imminent and it looks like he might be right. The release of an Apple tablet will likely mean an upgrade to the iPhone and iPod Touch OS, adding features that will run across all three devices. Though Apple is as tight-lipped as usual regarding any future releases, it will be exciting to watch over the next couple of weeks, as we get closer to the Apple event.

This week's apps include an iPhone battery power management app and a fun and challenging 2D airplane dogfighting game.

BatteryDoctor (99 cents) helps you lengthen the life of your iPhone battery and offers several tips to maximize your charge. Anyone who owns an iPhone knows that part of having all these cool apps and features means you need to watch your battery life closely. Unfortunately, a lot of these games I recommend are some of the worst offenders when it comes to using up your charge, so having an app to monitor your usage is extremely handy. BatteryDoctor helps you keep track of battery usage and gives detailed information about how much power is used up by common iPhone uses.

The interface for BatteryDoctor includes tabs across the bottom of the screen for battery status, maintenance, and usage tips. The battery status shows how much charge you have and how much time you have for various iPhone functions such as talk time, browsing the Internet, and using battery-intensive iPhone apps like games. The maintenance tab focuses on giving your iPhone or iPod Touch a "Full Cycle Charge." This section gives you instructions for how to maximize your charge and performs maintenance to give your battery a longer lifespan. The tips section gives you (mostly obvious) information to prolong battery life through settings like turning off push notifications and adjusting brightness. Overall, BatteryDoctor is a fairly good app for monitoring your battery, but I wonder how useful this app will be once you've absorbed all the information presented. Either way, for a dollar, I think this app is worth the money.

MiniSquadron ($2.99) is a game that came out last year that was recommended to me by many people after writing my best iPhone games of 2009 post. In MiniSquadron, you battle it out through several waves of 2D dogfights with a number of different enemies and various landscapes. The control system consists of an onscreen joystick in the lower left of the screen to control your plane and a fire button in the lower right. You'll need to complete several waves of attacking aircraft, all with unique weapons and strategies you'll have to figure out in order to complete each wave. The levels are divided up into selectable areas across an island, each with different backgrounds and enemy types to contend with.

MiniSquadron's frenetic gameplay alone is addictive and challenging enough to keep you playing, but you also can unlock new planes (56 total) with different armor types, maneuverability, weapons, and imaginative cartoon-like designs. When you feel confident with your piloting capabilities, you can play a survival mode with wave after wave of enemies to see how far you can get, or play multiplayer games with friends on a shared Wi-Fi connection. Overall, MiniSquadron's smooth cartoon-like graphics paired with challenging gameplay and replay value make it one of the better 2D action games for iPhone. Once you start collecting new (and strange) planes to fly, you will quickly see how this game will keep you coming back for more.

What's your favorite iPhone app? Do you think BatteryDoctor is worth the money for monitoring your charge? What's your secret for getting past the most waves in MiniSquadron? Would you consider buying the new Apple Tablet? Let me know in the comments!

PDF enthusiasts have a new Web converter tool at their disposal with PDFmyURL, a simple, one-function site that converts any live Web site into a static PDF file--something handy for offline reading, long-term archiving, and sticking on PDF-friendly e-book readers like Amazon's Kindle. It can also be a lifesaver, if you're on a computer without PDF-making software that would otherwise enable you to "print" a PDF copy of your own.

In every way, PDFmyURL, which launched on Tuesday, is the exact opposite of one of our favorite PDF sites, PDFMeNot (currently down), which takes hosted PDF links and turns them into HTML-friendly Web pages--the big difference, of course, being that when PDFMeNot is done, you have a lean, mean Web page to tear through, whereas PDFmyURL leaves you with, well...a PDF. Not quite as sexy.

The tool does a phenomenal job at maintaining formatting, including correct font sizes and in-line images. Advanced users also have a number of tweaks they can add to the end of whichever URL they drop in that can change how the PDF is created, my favorite being the size of the paper on which you may intend to printing it. This let me turn the front door of CNET News into something that would fit on an 11x17-inch tabloid print. All this without any software required--except that is, to read the finished product.

(via Download Squad)

Below is a standard-sized PDF it spat out of the front door of CNET News:

news.cnet

Originally posted at Web Crawler

CLARIFICATION: 1/15/10 at 2:50 pm PT. The video notes that Firefox mobile appears to only work in landscape mode. This is because the Nokia N900 doesn't support portrait mode.

The way development is going at Mozilla, it won't be long before we see the first full release of Firefox for a mobile device. Actually, two releases. Mozilla is making its browser's first mobile entrant Nokia's N900 and N810 Internet Tablet, both running on the Linux-based Maemo operating system.

This First Look video shows off the point Mozilla has reached so far in Firefox 1.0 for Maemo--Release Candidate 2. We learned after shooting this video that Mozilla plans to have a third release candidate before making the mobile browser widely available to owners of the two supported Nokia devices. And that's a good idea.

We've long known that Firefox for mobile phones will feature minimal controls up top, instead utilizing controls and menu buttons in left and right gutters that you access by sliding your finger left and right on touch-screen phones. The usability feels fine there, but some combination of the Nokia N900 test device and Firefox itself added up to sluggish touch response.

The add-ons manager is Firefox's mobile claim to fame. Opera introduced widgets in Opera Mobile 9.5 for Windows and Symbian phones (9.7 is the most recent stable version; 10 beta is the most recent, period.) Yet widgets are far from the Web extensions that Mozilla envisions, including one add-on, Weave, that will sync data across Firefox browsers. It's nice getting a peek at the add-ons, but the selections are understandably few so far.

Check out our take on Firefox 1.0 Maemo RC2 and chime in with your own opinions.

Related: Firefox for Maemo closing in on final release

If you've been discounting Seesmic's Twitter app for BlackBerry because of its spare tweeting features, you wouldn't be alone. As one of the newer Twitter apps for BlackBerry, Seesmic started out thin but has been steadily picking up features since its initial November '09 release.

A Thursday update to Seesmic for BlackBerry fills in some big coverage holes missing from Seesmic's proficient desktop tweeter for Windows and Mac. It may be time for those heavy Twitter users among you to get Seesmic back on your radar, if not on your BlackBerry.

Retweeting is Seesmic's main addition in the latest release, where the retweet funtionality pops up into the options menu. Retweeting quickly reposts another user's 140 characters as is. For more creative control, there's also Quote, which will let you edit a tweet--even adding geolocation, a short URL, and a photo--to the message before sending.

Like Ubertwitter, Seesmic for Blackberry now includes a preview of a picture embedded within an opened tweet. Good. Now you can slake your curiosity without having to leave the app or wait for a full-size image to load in the browser. The same goes for links leading to Google maps.

Another feature to crop up within Seesmic for BlackBerry helps hasty tweeters delete embarrassing messages. If you misspeak, a deleted tweet is a click in the options menu away.

Thanks to Seesmic's new-found support for BIS-B (Blackberry Internet Service Browser), a mobile Internet network hosted by BlackBerry-maker RIM, Seesmic can still run without a Web connection. UberTwitter also supports BIS-B.

Though there are still some worrisome kinks to be worked out (for instance, our quotes showed up in the Twitter.com timeline, but not direct retweets), Seesmic has progressed enough since its earliest days to warrant further inspection.

Existing users can opt in to the update, waiting a few days for BlackBerry App World to carry the newest version, or replace the app by pointing the mobile browser to Seesmic.com and downloading on of the following:

• Version 1.2 for BlackBerry 4.6.1 and higher
• Version 1.1 for 4.6.0 and higher
• Version 1.2 for Tour, Storm 1 and 2, and OS 5.0
• Version 1.2 for OS 4.5 phones

We received an installation error when we tried replacing the app on a Bold 9700, but deleting the previous install and rebooting did the trick.