Yelp provided a sneaky way to get augmented reality in their new app, but they might have made things worse for all of us.  In a post yesterday on TechCrunch, Matt Galligan thinks that this move might make Apple look even harder at each app approval — taking longer for each one, and rejecting a higher percentage.  That’s not good.

He makes some good points.  Here’s his basic argument:

My concern is that Yelp has set an awful precedent by this act. Now, every app developer will likely undergo even more scrutiny. Accessing private API’s goes against the agreement every iPhone developer has to abide by when submitting applications to the App Store. By subverting this agreement through an “easter egg”, Yelp could very well cause the approval process to become more draconian. Whereas before, Apple was primarily looking for trademark violations, “correct” usage of their Human Interface Guidelines, and show-stopping bugs, they’ll now have to go over each app with fine-toothed comb to make sure no feature that is likely to be unsanctioned will be released. Now granted, this may also be seen as a big cry for openness in the App Store, but so long as the App Store approval process remains in the status quo, deceitful acts like this won’t continue to go unnoticed by them.

I’d like to say I disagree, but I can’t.  I still don’t understand why Apple wanted developers to wait for 3.1 to release AR apps, but Yelp probably should have listened.  It’s still a neat app to show off to friends, but now things might get a bit rougher for all of us.

Yelp’s new easter egg is cool, but it might be bad for all of us is a post from: iPhone App Tips

The new Yelp 3.0 app is pretty slick, with a handful of new features.  The best one, however, is undocumented — a very slick augmented reality view.

We talked about augmented reality a bit with the Wikitude app a few days ago, but Yelp is the first US-based one we’ve seen.  To access it on the app, shake the phone a few times and you’ll enable a feature called “the Monicle”.  This will show the world through your camera, and overlay locations of nearby restaurants, bars and other businesses.

It’s really more cool than useful, but it’s fun to play with.  Here’s a quick video that shows how to activate it:

I expect we’ll see many more of these types of apps in the near future, so it should be an exciting year.

Yelp sneaks some augmented reality on your phone is a post from: iPhone App Tips

One of the hottest category of apps we’ll see in the next year are is likely the Augmented Reality apps.  These are programs that allow you to look through your camera, and see the world beyond it with information overlays on it.  The possibilities of these kinds of apps are endless.

One of the first big AR apps due to come out for the iPhone is called Wikitude.  They just released version 3.0 for Android today, and promise an iPhone app soon.

Here is their promo — slick, but superficial:

And here is a short demo of their app on Android to show how it works:

This app will allow you to log in using your Google, Twitter, Yahoo or OpenID account, after which you can add/edit content.  It should be pretty slick.

The app is due to launch after the iPhone 3.1 firmware is released, likely in the next month or two.

Wikitude app coming to iPhone soon is a post from: iPhone App Tips