Kayak

The first, and often most difficult, part of getting home is figuring out how to do it! Depending on where you live, flying may be the best option. Simply deciding to fly is only half the battle. Now you have to choose from the 6+ airlines that fly out of Syracuse Hancock International Airport (and the hundreds that fly out of connecting airports). Finding the cheapest flight comes down to picking a good date and time…and that's where Kayak comes in.

Kayak allows you to do blanket searches for flights based on budget, time, date of departure and airline preference. It can show you deals you had no idea existed and makes the process of booking a flight so much easier. The free application is available iOS (for iPhone and iPad), Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone and if ads bother you, they offer a $0.99 paid upgrade to remove them.

TripIt

No matter how you decide to travel, keeping track of your plans can be a daunting task. With parents forwarding you confirmation numbers, changing flight times, alternate bus schedules and e-tickets, it can be very difficult to make sure you get where you need to on time. When you receive a confirmation email from anywhere you book, simply forward it to plans@tripit.com.

TripIt instantly recognizes reservations from 3,000+ booking sites including cruises, restaurants, concerts and more. You can easily share trip plans with family or colleagues directly, or let Facebook and LinkedIn contacts know when and where you’re headed.

TripIt is available on iOS (for iPhone and iPad), Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, free of charge. TripIt also has a "pro" version that features a travel assistant designed to find deals and provide more comprehensive coverage.

Flight Board

One of the most frustrating parts of flying is trying to figure out if your flight will be delayed. There's actually a ton of flight tracking applications that require you to input your flight information but something a little different might be nice. Flight Board is a companion application to Flight Tracker Pro, a full-featured flight tracking application.

Flight Board mimics the displays found in airports that can show the status of every flight of an airline or into/out of an airport. It's a cool way to view flight status and can provide you with a ton of information to help you figure out baggage claim numbers, where to meet your ride and much more.

Flight Board is available for both iOS (for iPhone and iPad) and Android for $3.99.

Waze

Travelling isn't always all about flying. Sometimes, home is just a simple road trip away. In that case, you should not leave Syracuse without Waze, a social GPS application. In addition to providing turn-by-turn navigation, you become part of a local driving community in your area and the app can help keep you safe, avoid traffic and save you time.

After typing in your destination address, just drive with the app open on your phone to passively contribute traffic and other road data, but you can also take a more active role by sharing road reports on accidents, police traps, or any other hazards along the way, helping to give other users in the area a 'heads-up' about what's to come.

Waze is available for iOS (for iPhone and iPad) and Android for free. While the app is still pretty new, as the community grows it will only continue to get better and more useful.

Gas Buddy

As gas prices continue to rise, the hardest part of any drive is not getting killed at the pump. If you're trying to save a little on gas, Gas Buddy can certainly help. You can quickly find the closest gas station or the one with the cheapest prices and sort your results by distance, price or company. In an emergency, Gas Buddy can be a real life-saver if you're stuck on a major interstate and don't know when the next gas station will appear. The Gas Buddy website is constantly being updates with new prices and changes as they happen so you should always be able to access the most accurate information, wherever you are.

Gas Buddy makes the experience social and provides some great incentive to report pricing on gas. For every report you submit, you earn points to prizes and weekly competitions to win free gas, vehicles and other prizes.

Gas Buddy is a free application available for both iOS (just for iPhone right now), Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone.

Oink

Sometimes, getting to where you're headed is only half the fun. It's once you get there that you really start the adventure. Whether you're headed back home or to somewhere else for a vacation, you should try out Oink, a new social application that lets you rate the things around you. Instead of just saying you like a place, you can tell people what pizza to try at your favorite restaurant, how to get your coffee at the local Starbucks and where to go to have fun.

You could easily find the most popular items on a menu and see if a friend has tried anything there. Then if there's something you like, it’s just a single press to rate it and share it with friends. Oink is a new social app created by Kevin Rose, the tech star behind projects like Digg. Here's the catch with Oink… it's not ready yet. Oink has released a "builder" application that tasks the public with creating venues, adding content and getting the site off the ground. This is your chance to get your ideas onto a social project that will soon go viral and become hugely popular.

The Oink app is free for iOS but will soon come to other mobile platforms as well.

foursquare

Yup, had to mention it.

Especially for those of us in the iSchool, it never gets old to talk about foursquare and the addictive product that @dens and his team have created. No matter where you're headed for break (or anywhere for that matter), you should be checking in and contributing to the awesome location-based community around you.

Like many other social platforms, foursquare only gets better with more usage and with the most recent release, the application is better than ever. With a "radar" feature to tell you what's going on around you, check-ins at specific movies and events and even more awesome badges and tips, if you haven't already downloaded it, now is the time to get foursquare on iOS, Android, Blackberry, Palm and Windows Phone.

 What app are you using to make traveling easier? Leave it in the comments, contact John at jburke01@syr.edu or tweet him @JohnBurke.

Available as a universal application for both iPhone and iPad, Calcbot takes the guesswork out of calculation providing users with an intelligent display that displays not only the numbers you press but the expressions as well. You'll never lose your place or find yourself making errors because you weren't sure how far in a calculation you were. As you work, Calcbot will display all the numbers you've pressed and live update your total as you go.

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Taking it a step further, Calcbot features a ton of advanced mathematical expressions. Instead of clouding your view with an intimidatingly advanced scientific display, formulas and functions that are not for every-day use can be found by swiping to the right.

One of the most notable features of Calcbot is the history "tape" that not only saves each of your calculations but the expressions you used to get there. Think of it like a receipt, constantly logging what you've typed and making it available for later use. Choose to use or save either the expression itself or just the result of it without a second thought.

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In addition to just viewing your expressions and calculations, you can choose to send that information via email or reusing it at a later time. Say you're keeping track of all your daily expenses. With Calcbot, you can call up your latest total easily and add to it as you need. Once you're done, it's simple to send that information to yourself or others via email. Control your experience even further with the ability to use sound effects of turn them off if you wish. Since most people use calculators for financial transactions, Tapbots also offers the option to round currency too.

Using Calcbot on your iPad offers you the same great features but a totally new experience. With the added screen real estate of the larger iPad, calculate and view your history at the same time by turning the device to landscape. In portrait mode, the app utilizes the entire screen as a beautiful, high-quality calculator. Calcbot feels right at home on the iPad and without a calculator application provided by Apple, this app fits right in.

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Like every other Tapbot app, the team takes a simple concept that has been over-complicated and brings it back to the basics. Without compromising features and detail, the developer is able to make the application very simple and fun to use. The motivation for the developers to create this app was very simple in nature and explained on their blog. In their eyes, there are two main problems with calculators:

• There is no easy way to see the calculator's expression so even if you are slightly distracted you can forget where you were and have to start all over.
• Many people have a hard time remembering numbers and have no idea how to use a conventional calculator's memory buttons.

After using the app for only a few minutes, it is safe to say that Tapbots has elegantly addressed both problems. From the blog, the developer actually had originally only developed the app for the iPad. After partnering with tap tap tap for marketing purposes, Calcbot was made universal. Once you start using it, you'll quickly see that the way it handles expressions and calculations will make you drop Apple's default app. With support for multitasking and iPhone 4's Retina Display, Calcbot looks awesome on whatever device you're using.

To make the deal even sweeter, Tapbots partnered up with Macheist to offer Realmac's Socialite for free just by spreading the word about the release. If you haven't seen it, Socialite is a wonderful desktop application for Mac that lets you manage all your social networks and news feeds from one place.

In my use, I found Calcbot excitingly simple to use and just plain fun. I'm not that great with math, so even using it with basic expressions and day-to-day calculations was welcomed. There is no learning curve to Calcbot. With a elegant interface, you'll know exactly how to use the app without reading any instructions. You'll quickly come to rely on features such as the history tape and expression view. The app is currently available for $1.99 on the App Store. Let us know in the comments what you think about it!

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With an intuitively simple interface, powerful features, expression view, calculation recall and more, Calcbot is a wonderful addition to the Tapbot family and will certainly easily replace your existing calculator on either the iPhone or iPad. Math has never been so  much fun!

Rating: 9/10

Calcbot | $1.99 | Tapbots

Weightbot

Weightbot ($1.99) is a simple and fun way to track your weight over time. In the words of the developers themselves, "Weightbot takes something as boring as data entry, and makes it fun with beautiful graphics, animation, and sound. Adding your daily weight will become a small moment you'll look forward to."

It sports a really clean and simple user interface and asks you only to enter your weight daily - no complicated charts, measurements, times, meal logs, etc. Weightbot plots your data on a gorgeous graph so you can see how you are doing.

Don't let the simple design of this app fool you - it has a lot of great features to keep you interested. Weightbot allows you to set goals for yourself, monitor your BMI (Body Mass Index) and even see an estimated date of when you will reach your target weight. Just rotate your device to see customizable charts that show your progress the way you want to see it. The app will even back up your data to Tapbots' 128-bit SSL secured servers and allow you to retrieve your data online. Better yet, Weightbot can even talk to the Wi-Fi Withings scale, allowing automatic recording of your weight every time you step on the scale!

Convertbot

We've all been there - "How many feet are in a mile?", "Wait, so if it's a dollar here, how much is it in Euros?". Convertbot ($1.99) is a simple and "amazingly smart" unit conversion tool. Sporting over 500 units in over twenty categories, Convertbot can convert time, currency, length, data rate, fuel, power, pressure and many more. (It can even convert radioactivity, which is pretty cool). Taking this a step further, Convertbot can even work with mixed units, such as pounds + ounces, minutes + seconds, etc. Convertbot takes money in stride, able to convert over 150 currency types  instantly with the current conversion rates updated automatically.

Convertbot also includes a calculator to perform basic calculations in style. You can even tell it how many decimal places to show before rounding.

Pastebot

The newest member of the robot family, Pastebot ($2.99) is a powerful clipboard manager changing the way you copy and paste. Just copy anything from your iPhone using the native copy/paste controls, run Pastebot and your clippings will automatically be imported for you. You can even create clippings and import photos right from within the application.

It's not just about the stuff you have in Pastebot, it's how you manage and edit it. Easily search for exactly what you are looking for using the built-in search tool and even edit your clippings right from within the app. With over 14 filters, you can perform more complex tasks such as "find and replace" as well as HTML tag insertion, image cropping, color changes, and new ones coming with every release. Whatever you do, you can quickly copy your items back to the iPhone with one tap. Alternatively, you can send clippings via email or save images back to your photo library.

This is where it gets really cool. Pastebot includes a Mac companion application, called Pastebot Sync. This tool allows you to copy text and images from your Mac and paste them on your iPhone. With only a Wi-Fi connection, you can "magically" send clips back and forth from your Mac and iPhone or iPod touch.

The Robot Family

Tapbots has done an excellent job creating focused applications that reinvent a simple task and make it fun to do. Whether it's monitoring your weight, doing some math or copying text, there's a robot ready to help you! Tapbots promises more apps to add to the family and have been teasing users about an upcoming Twitter bot. The developers also are looking to the future and have plans to support multitasking and possibly iPad-specific versions of their apps as well.

The iPhone 4 provides a number of exciting new features including video chat capabilities, a front-facing camera, retina display technology designed to increase pixel saturation and increase sharpness of the display, as well as a new 5 mega pixel camera featuring LED flash. The new iPhone is powered by Apple's custom A4 silicon chip and will come with iOS 4 upon it's release. Additionally, the iPhone's form factor is noticeably thinner and features a larger battery.

iPhone 4 comes in both black or white and in two sizes: 16GB and 32GB  priced at $199 and $299 respectively. Apple will begin accepting pre-orders on June 15th with a release date scheduled for June 24th. For more information, check out Apple's iPhone product page.

From the announcement:

Our new SDK is unified across all devices running the iPhone OS, which means that developers can download one binary for development across all Apple iPhone OS devices.The new SDK supports two ad formats in native iPad applications: text & tile ads and image ads. Both of these ad formats are available in the three IAB standard ad sizes: 300x250, 728x90 and 486x60.

Various examples of AdMob's new SDK.

It looks like AdMob is already hard at work teaming up with developers such as Amazon which is set to be rolling out a Kindle ad campain tailored for the iPad (awkwardly ironic, huh?).

(via MacRumors)

For more information, check out the All Things Digital website.

The new version of App Store Spotlight sports a completely new design, backend and purpose. More information is coming soon but you'll definitely want to bookmark this page!

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