Official Google+ App for iPhone Now Available

Google has just released the official Google+ app for iPhone on the App Store. The app is free and available here, and at the moment of writing this Google hasn’t updated its Mobile webpage to showcase the new app yet.

The Google+ iOS app provides a native interface to access much of the functionalities of the website, such as the Huddle group messaging feature – which was exclusive to Android devices prior to the app’s approval. The dashboard of the Google+ app presents a grid of icons to access the Stream, Huddle, Photos, your Profile and Circles, as well as a Notifications tab at the bottom that will open a vertical list of all your incoming notifications. Whilst much of the navigation seems to rely on web views optimized for the iPhone and fetched by the device, the animations when switching between sections are quite snappy and fast on iOS 4. Just like on the desktop, the Stream provides recent updates from the people you follow and your Circles, allowing you to check for new posts with the popular “pull to refresh gesture” and comment or +1 others’s posts. You can’t +1 from the home page – you have to open a single post and hit the + button in the upper right corner, while a text field at the bottom will let you leave a comment. You can also “mute” or “report” a post. The app is capable of sending push notifications for new comments, shares, and so forth. Read more

Lion Signage Appears At Italian Retailer Ahead Of Official Launch

As reported by Italian website Macity [a Google translation is not possible as Macity seems to have pulled the article before we could generate a link, Google cache here] the first promotional material for OS X Lion has been set up in advance at Italian retail chain Euronics in Taranto, at the Mongolfiera shopping mall. Whilst recent rumors have pegged the new OS for a Wednesday launch (tomorrow), Apple hasn’t confirmed any official release date, nor did they authorize retailers to showcase signage ahead of the much anticipated launch. It appears, as Macity reports, that employees at Euronics wrongly set up the signage before the rumored launch date, as machines spotted in the electronics section of the shopping mall haven’t even been correctly updated for Lion (they’re still running OS X 10.6.6, whilst 10.6.8 is a requirement to update to the new OS).

The signage touts Lion’s biggest new features such as multi-touch gestures, Launchpad and Mission Control. The banners say “Now on every new Mac”, reinforcing speculation that new computers will be released shortly after the new OS, running Lion by default as a rumor previously claimed. The banners also encourage users to try out Lion, heavily promoting with photos the various multitasking gestures enabled in the OS.

According to recent reports, Apple has shipped hard drives containing Lion to retail stores so that employees can install the OS on store floor machines. Others also report “overnights” are planned later today to train retail staff on Lion, and change in-store promotional material for the (alleged) launch tomorrow morning. New MacBook Airs (as well as new Thunderbolt-equipped Cinema Displays) are expected to launch alongside Lion as well.

Fantastical Adds Lion Support, And We’re Giving Away 10 Codes

Fantastical is a calendar assistant that works with Apple’s iCal and the popular third-party BusyCal software, allowing you to quickly creates event in your default system calendar with plain English. Thanks to a built-in natural language parser, Fantastical lets you write down something like “Get a new MacBook Air tomorrow at Apple Store at 5 PM”, and see the sentence becoming a new event with all the necessary fields already filled in your calendar. And because Fantastical directly plugs into calendar accounts configured on your Mac, you won’t need to enter your information again.

Fantastical 1.0.3, released today, adds full Lion compatibility and a new Lion-only feature that allows you to swipe with two fingers to move between months in the calendar. The animation is really nice, and reminds me of Safari’s new feature for navigating webpages with a two-finger swipe on Lion. Among various bug fixes, Fantastical also adds a new color menubar icon preference, a last-selected calendar option, and several parsing engine fixes.

You can read our initial review of Fantastical here, and buy the app from the Mac App Store. However, the Flexibits developers have been kind enough to offer 10 promo codes to celebrate the next major release of OS X with MacStories readers, so if you’re interested in the giveaway jump after the break for the full details of how to enter. Read more

Saver For iPhone Giveaway: Mundane Expense Tracking Made Beautiful

Two weeks ago we reviewed Saver for iPhone, which was a new expense-tracking app for the iPhone that had just launched in the App Store. In the review, I made particular note of the design of Saver – which I feel has one the nicest user interfaces of any iPhone app I’ve used. For a task that is important (for many) but often dull and boring, Saver not only makes things a little more exciting and vibrant but it also makes it extremely easy (whilst still being fairly powerful) to accomplish various tasks such as adding an expense entry or viewing what kinds of things you spend most on.

You can read our full review of Saver here and purchase Saver on the App Store here. However, the developer of Saver has been kind enough to offer MacStories readers 3 copies of the app so we are running a giveaway. If you are interested, jump the break for the full details of how to enter.

Read more

Sparrow 1.3 Brings Lion Support, Interface Changes

Sparrow started out as a minimal, Tweetie-like email experiment for Mac back in October of last year and, following the success of the public beta, eventually evolved into a powerful desktop solution to access Gmail and IMAP email accounts using new interface concepts inspired by iOS apps, Mac gems like Twitter and Reeder, or other changes previewed by Apple in Lion. As we reported in our previous coverage, the latest big update to the app, Sparrow 1.2, went as far as adding social support with Facebook integration,  Gravatar support, and more.

Sparrow 1.3 was approved yesterday, but the developers had to quickly pull it from sale as a critical bug that caused the app to crash was discovered. After apologizing for the technical error and uploading a patched version for non-Mac App Store users, the team announced a fix had been already submitted with the request of an expedited review from Apple. Personally, I updated to Sparrow 1.3 yesterday and didn’t experience any issues, but I decided to hold my coverage until the promised fix would be available on the App Store – more importantly, the entire app had to come back on Apple’s servers as the developers pulled it to make sure no one would install a “buggy” version. Read more

Reminder: Apple’s Q3 Earnings Call Today – 5 PM ET

Later today, starting at 5:00 PM ET (2:00 PM PT) Apple will hold its Q3 2011 earnings call to reveal their financial results, shortly after the market closes. Apple will, as usual be offering an audio-only live stream of the call that will be available here. Meanwhile here at MacStories, we will be following the earnings call with a post covering it live – this will be a post continuously updated with notes from the call.

As for what today’s earnings call will bring, AllThingsD has an article this morning quoting a JP Morgan analyst who believes Apple will exceed expected earnings “by a lot”. It is also helpful to note that for the last 13 quarters, Apple has beaten analysts’ financial expectations – many expect Apple could do it again for this quarter’s results.

Earlier this month some (non-Wall Street) Apple analysts from The Mac Observer’s Finance Board expected (on average) for Apple to have sold around 17.6 million iPhones, 8.3 million iPads, 8.3 iPods and 4.3 million Macs. The same analysts believe Apple could have seen 69% year-over-year growth in Q3 2011.

Be sure to tune in at 5 PM ET for a full breakdown of the Q3 2011 financial results from Apple’s earnings call. For those in other time zones, the earnings call is at:

2:00 PM – San Francisco

6:00 PM – Rio de Janeiro

10:00 PM – London

11:00 PM – Rome

1:00 AM (Wed) – Moscow

5:00 AM (Wed) – Beijing

7:00 AM (Wed) – Sydney

9:00 AM (Wed) – Auckland

For all other time zones, click here.

Apple Reveals One Billion Visitors To Retail Stores, Another 33 Stores Set To Open By September 25

Apple today revealed to an Australian site, Current, that it has seen over 1 billion customers through its retail doors since it opened the first Apple Store in Washington just over ten years ago in May of 2001. Current got the information from Apple after they had contacted them to confirm the opening of the eleventh Apple Store in Australia, which is set to open this Saturday in Penrith, New South Wales.

Apple Retail has been in business for 10 years. During this period, we have had over 1 billion visitors through our doors, many of whom are new to the Mac, as the Apple Store is the best place to learn about all the latest products from Apple.

Apple also revealed that by the end of Apple’s financial year (ending September 25th) they plan to have 363 Apple Stores open, worldwide. Given that Apple currently has 330 stores open that means Apple is planning to open another 33 stores in just over two months – effectively that is a new store roughly every three days averaged out.

Our retail offering continues to grow, with Penrith the 11th store in Australia, since we opened Apple Store Sydney just three years ago. Globally we are planning to have 363 stores in fiscal 2011.

Current also asked Apple representatives what made their retail stores so popular and got a response that referenced service as being the “hallmark of every Apple Store”. In particular they pointed towards the fact that the response from customers has been “overwhelming” with 1 million customers taking an advantage of the Personal Setup offering in the last quarter alone.

[Current via The Next Web]

Stylapps, A Beautiful Showcase of Stylish iPad Apps

As a geek, I’m always excited about the next great app that may solve one of the annoyances in my workflow or provide a better solution to a problem I didn’t know I had. Whilst functionality is still king when it comes down to choosing the proper tools to administer our workflows and check things off our to-do manager, more often than not we’re also looking for beautiful software that meets our iOS expectations for elegant interfaces and intuitive navigation schemes. Stylapps, a free iPad app released in late June, aggregates “stylish iPad applications” that are becoming increasingly difficult to find in the tumultuous sea of daily App Store releases.

Stylapps starts up with an elegant grid of iPad screenshots placed against a light background that greatly contributes to enhancing the colors of the apps that are being presented on screen. The app comes with refresh and search buttons to find your way through specific releases, but more importantly there is a filter icon in the upper left corner that allows you to pick certain categories to check out new apps released on the App Store and hand-picked by Stylapps. So if you don’t want to learn about stylish new Games, but you’re in for a Productivity and Business treat, you can drill down into the aforementioned categories and start looking for new apps that may suit your needs. Screenshots in the main page are large enough to provide a quick preview of what you’re looking at, however you can also tap on a thumbnail to open a single-app view with description, iTunes screenshots, App Store button and a link back to the developer’s website. To go back to the main list, you just have to swipe your finger on screen; a two-finger swipe lets you jump 10 pages of app picks. A “star” button next to each thumbnail enables you to save an app to your favorites, a section that lives locally on your iPad to collect apps you may want to check out later.

Stylapps’ curated section of beautiful and stylish apps quite resembles my tastes, but in my tests I’ve found the app to be far from perfect as far as stability goes. I’ve experienced a few crashes when navigating between pages, and a bug with opening screenshots will sometime “freeze” the app into a lightbox overlay mode that will force you to quit and re-open.

Still, these issues occurred rarely and I was able to browse the selection of software offered by Stylapps to find some interesting new apps I hadn’t covered here on MacStories. Stylapps is free, looks very nice on the iPad, and it’ll probably help you find the next gorgeous app you didn’t know about.