We are nearing the first birthday of Localscope and feel proud to see how Localscope has benefited people in their daily lives. Localscope has helped people find places in the most intuitive ways possible and ensured that they get what they are looking for by seamlessly tapping into 5 diverse geo information sources. as search and retrieval is one of the primarily required applications in any field, we chose to start with it. However we have had a much larger vision of Localscope. We imagine Localscope to be a unique form of a browser that is designed to present and enable use of local information, just like web browsers present web pages. We imagine Localscope to become your high tech goggles that lets you see things around you that you otherwise couldn't. With version 2, we are taking a big step towards this vision.

We realized that Localscope v1 is the perfect app to go to when you are looking for a new location or are in a new one. However, it isn't very useful when people are in a familiar place, i.e. home, office, school, etc. Localscope v2 changes that. Localscope now fetches geo-tagged photo and video content from various media sources and presents a unique new view of places, people and things around you. Now even familiar places that you spend most of your time in, come alive with fresh visual perspectives that enable you to rediscover your surroundings like never before. While Panoramio presents professional quality pictures of places, the Instagram source provides creative expressions of people around you and the Youtube source lets you see all published video content that is geo-tagged to your vicinity. Since each source provides unique types of content contributed socially or professionally, the diversity of information coming together in Localscope v2 provides an un-matched local discovery experience and serves up unprecedented results when you need to find anything around you.

Our technical challenge with v2 has been that while we increased the features in Localscope by more than 2 times of v1, we strived to make it faster, snappier and more intuitive than the first version. To achieve this, under the hood we have re-architected and re-written Localscope from ground up to make it scalable and performant. Along with these fundamental additions, Localscope v2 adds a lot of features and improvements, including the all new source manager that puts you in complete control of what sources are used and even their order of appearance in the source slider.

Following is a comprehensive list of whats new in Localscope v2:

• Re-imagined and redesigned to provide geo tagged rich media along with local information
• 6 new sources: Facebook places, Instagram, Flickr, Panoramio, Picasa and Youtube
• Brand new gallery view for browsing geo tagged images and video.
• Enabled Discover mode for Bing and Wikimapia sources
• New source manager interface for Discover and Search - Enable, disable or re-order sources to your liking
• New home dashboard
• Results are now ordered by distance, nearest first
• Richer list view, now displays star ratings and counts for checkins, likes and other relevant info.
• Redesigned detail view - Now shows a lot of rich information from every source
• Quick next / previous navigation between result details
• Gesture driven image slideshow for viewing full screen pictures from the detail view
• Improved map and augmented reality views with smoother transitions and animations
• Refresh buttons for Map and Augmented Reality views
• Improved source slider designed to easily switch between a large number of sources
• Now, flick or tap the source slider to switch sources
• New navigation app integration - iGo Primo
• Richer location sharing via Email and Facebook
• "Browse All Nearby" is now "Discover"
• New in-app help and FAQ
• Completely redesigned architecture provides for much improved performance
• Enhanced overall user experience with improved gestures, animations and sounds
• Super optimized for the iPhone 4S for blazingly fast performance

We believe that Localscope v2 is one of the best inventions to roll out of Cynapse and hope you enjoy using it as much as we do.

Time flies by. Localscope will be a year old in a months time. These past 11 months have been some of the most exhilarating months for us, here at Cynapse. With Localscope, we have been able to reach out to hundreds of thousands of users across the world and help them in ways that we as creators of the app didn’t imagine were possible. The heart warming comments added in the App Store by our users, reveal delightful stories of how Localscope saved their day. The overwhelming feedback from our users and the blogger community makes us feel proud to have built Localscope while inspiring us to make it even better. Apple too has shown a lot of love for Localscope; we’ve been featured in New and Noteworthy, Whats Hot, Staff Favorites, App of Week and various popular featured lists like On the Grid, City Guides, Places & Parking and more.

In this time, Localscope has grown to now support 18 languages and integrate with 11 popular navigation apps for turn-by-turn directions.

And this is just the beginning...

In the coming month, we are gearing up to release a ground breaking v2 of Localscope that will enable users to tap into user-generated social and visual content to discover places; in a way that has never been experienced before. Our goal is to make Localscope a location browser that lets users search, discover, share and curate geo-relevant social and public information about their vicinity intuitively. But before we release the new version of Localscope, we want to take a step back and thank the entire iOS community for supporting us through our journey. We are happy to announce a special holiday discount price for Localscope at $0.99 from 24th November, Black Friday Eve to 28th November, Cyber Monday.

If you don’t own Localscope yet, go ahead and grab your copy of Localscope from the App Store now, its your best chance to get the local discovery app for less!