Apple’s Passbook is continuing to grow and is now getting more adoption, most notably airlines that are allowing its customers to download their boarding passes onto their iPhones and simply scan and board. PassBook is Apple’s all-in one storage app, allowing users to store boarding passes, gift cards, tickets, and even prescriptions, putting them all in one place for easy access.

Apple has some airlines on Passbook now, including American Airlines and Lufthansa, and most recently Air Canada which added support by updating its app for electronic boarding passes. Now, it seems that British Airways is also onboard to add support for electronic boarding passes on Passbook.

Appleinsider reports that one their readers emailed British Airways customer service about support for Passbook, and recieved an email response, confiriming that the ba.com team was already looking at the new feature.

I’m pleased to confirm that the ba.com team are already looking into our website being able to work with the new Apple app, available with the iOS6 upgrade. Please be assured that we will get our Passbook-compatible functionality live on ba.com as soon as we can.

British Airways already offered digital boarding passes through their iOS app in the past, but did not support Passbook. The integration into Passbook should be fairly easy considering the boarding passes are already digital. According to the report, British Airways has over 249 aircraft and serves 169 total destinations, meaning they have thousands of customers who can utilize the new feature. Passbook support continues to grow with British Airways adding support, and even Apple adding support to its own Apple Store application on the App Store.

Google Inc. (GOOG) has gone ahead to acquired yet another company to wind into its web of online companies and lab tests. The search giants latest acquisition is popular Mac OS X and iOS email client, Sparrow. Sparrow was introduced in February of 2011, and brought a simplified email application to users, looking for a simple, yet powerful application to handle rich HTML emails. Sparrow currently offers a number of features such as Gmail support as well as other iMAP email services.

The app also has, Dropbox support for uploading attachments, drag and drop attachments and even Growl support. Google’s Gmail labels are also already part of the application and will likely take on many more features from the the search giant’s massive cache of acquired companies and services. Google currently has over 43.1 billion dollars in cash to spend on acquisitions and is likely doing this to improve Gmail.

According to a Google spokeswoman, the company is reportedly acquiring Sparrow for a “new Gmail project” but will not disturb the team or app and will keep it running as usual. Google currently does not offer a desktop application on PC or Mac, and has a very simple web based application for Gmail on iOS. With the acquisition of Sparrow, Google would be bringing a team of developers who have developed for both the Mac OS X and iOS platforms, and know how to create a solid application.

At this point, it is unclear exactly what Google plans to do with Sparrow, however, with the company being a massive search giant, and controlling one of the biggest email clients in the world, acquiring Sparrow is a very smart move. In a report from CNN Money, Sparrow CEO commented, saying the following:

Now we’re joining the Gmail team to accomplish a bigger vision — one that we think we can better achieve with Google.

Google has acquired other companies in the past, such as Aardvark, and decided to incorporate the company into Google+ and then shut down the company. It is very likely that Sparrow may also be eliminated after Sparrow is thoroughly integrated into Google’s Gmail.

With that controversial point out of the way lets move on to the app itself which provides a start menu like interface for all the activities that you do frequently from launching apps, texting, calling, emailing, searching the web and more, you can set all of these actions up and customize them to meet your specific requirements.

One significant change with the pro version of Launch Center is how it looks which sees a significant improvement from its previous incarnation. From the polish of the app icon to the new grid layout the whole application looks like it’s just come out of a car showroom as it glints and gleams as you drill down through the activities that you want to launch.

When you first launch the app it will already be setup with default actions which include the ability to turn on the camera flash as a flashlight, toggle the brightness, search google and dial a contact to name but a few. It’s in the configuration of the app where you can personalize your requirements is where Launch Center Pro starts earning its stripes.

The first thing you’ll want to take advantage of when you start customizing Launch Center Pro is the use of Groups for while the initial grid is set to 4 x 3 squares to set to your own actions the use of Groups open up an additional 12 actions spots for each of the initial 12. Now that adds up to a lot of shortcuts which may defeat the purpose of the app in the first place but it’s a nice option to have!

Setting up your actions is easy, after going into edit mode, (there’s no wiggle here!), you can either edit an existing action by clicking on it or tap an empty one to create a new one. From here, after selecting to create an action you can choose from one of the common or installed actions before getting the option to customize them even further.

The level customization will depend on the action, for example if you have Tweetbot installed you’ll be able to choose from launching the app, tweeting, tweeting a specific username, launching a profile or searching, while choosing the Music app only provides the ability to launch it. This is not a limitation of Launch Center Pro however but more how any given app allows it to integrate.

Not only can you set a multitude of actions but you can also set the color of the icon and select one of a plethora of images to identify your icon, similar to the images you can have if you have Emoji enabled for your txt messages.

With your shortcuts all setup you can start using Launch Center Pro for what it was intended for, launching actions. Once you launch LCP you simply tap any shortcut and the associated action will launched, while accessing shortcuts that are part of a group requires you to tap and hold and then drag your finger to the shortcut you wish to launch.

There is also the ability to schedule actions which works more as a reminder than anything, rather than actually launching the requested action they launch an alert that will enable you to launch the action, kind of scheduling lite! This limit appears to be more of a limit of the Apple approval process than anything else however.

Once you’ve been using LCP {$2.99} for a few days consistently you’ll wonder how you’ve lived so long without it, even more so if you are a heavy user of the iPhone with a lot of apps as Launch Center Pro will do away with your need to remember where all your apps are.

What we like

• Polished looks
• Lots of customizable actions
• Launches actions not just app

What to know

• Controversial upgrade option
• Limited scheduler

Earlier in the year, Apple removed the iTunes U category in iTunes from iOS and introduced a standalone app dedicated to providing university and educational materials. According to a report from AllThingsD, the Cupertino company is planning to also introduce an app dedicated entirely to podcasts in iOS 6.

Like iTunes U, this would also push the podcast feature out of iTunes and into its own app, which would also operate and access data from Apple’s servers entirely on its own. Apple appears to be taking a similar approach to Facebook, by removing secondary but important features and giving them full fledged accessibility and support.

People familiar with Apple’s plans tell me that when its new iOS 6 software becomes widely available this fall, podcasts will have their own app, where users will be able to discover, download and play them on mobile devices. Users who access iTunes via laptop and desktop machines will still find them in that version of iTunes, though.

The report also mentioned that Apple is working on podcast producing technology which will likely be included in this app for users to create podcasts and share. Apple has removed Audiobooks, iTunes U, and now Podcasts out of the iTunes application, and is continuing to give smaller categories in iTunes, more features.

As a result, the company will likely witness an increased adoption in podcast usage and sharing as well as a boost in revenue from the Audiobooks category. The podcast category will become its own app and is expected ot be introduced in the public release of iOS 6 which will arrive later this fall.

{via 9to5 Mac}

Over the past year, Apple added a number of new applications to its App Store and ported over some of its existing Mac applications over to the iOS platform, such as iPhoto, GarageBand, and iMovie. Late Tuesday, Apple posted updates for all of the following apps: iPhoto, GarageBand, iMovie, and Cards.

iPhoto received a minor update for bug fixes and enhancements, as well as a minor UI tweak, adding a button to allow users to send out journals uploaded to iCloud. This would allow users to share the journal with one click. Cards, a rather simple Apple app, allows users to amake and send physical cards, straight from the app and integrates into Apple’s iOS ecosystem with the use of iTunes gift cards and such.

Any noticeable changes for the Cards app is currently unknown. iMovie received a minor fix allowing users to add their own personal movie soundtracks to a project, as well as minor stability improvements. GarageBand received the most stability improvements, fixing a bug that crashed the app when users tried to upload songs to iCloud or attempted to connect to SoundCloud.

These stability and UI improvements will likely continue over the course of several months, and as iPad and iPhone generations pass, until the mobile app operates very similar to that of the desktop.

{via CNET}

On Thursday, Apple held a special education event in New York City and introduced a number of software products, including the newest version of iBooks, iBooks 2, bringing textbooks to the iPad from large publishers including Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton-Mifflin.

Now anyone can create stunning iBooks textbooks, cookbooks, history books, picture books, and more for iPad. All you need is an idea and a Mac. Start with one of the Apple-designed templates that feature a wide variety of page layouts. Add your own text and images with drag-and-drop ease. Use Multi-Touch widgets to include interactive photo galleries, movies, Keynote presentations, 3D objects, and more. Preview your book on your iPad at any time. Then submit your finished work to the iBookstore with a few simple steps. And before you know it, you’re a published author.

Apple also released an iBooks Author application, which allows users to create their own textbooks for the iPad 2. Since then, Apple has posted the video of the event to its site, alongside all other past events.

The Cupertino company also posted the Podcast for the event in both HD and standard formats. Apple is continuously increasing support for iBooks and is attempting to move into the e-reading market to compete with other popular reading devices such as the Nook and Kindle.

On Sunday, Apple approved an app, titled GameStore, with an icon of what appeared to be a shopping cart in the far left corner. Screen shots for the app didn’t reveal much information.

Two German sites, Flo’s Weblog (Google translation) and iFun.de (Google translation) posted images and a link to the app. The app debuted on December 31st on the App Store and highighted several racing games, although none contained any actual content.

GameStore may have simply been an internal test for Apple, and has since been removed from the App Store. TUAW’s Erica Sadun reported that the app may have simply been sample code for an in-app purchasing developer test, and was likely mistakenly approved.

What developers do is upload a working skeleton application to iTunes Connect. You do this with the full understanding that you’ll be replacing or, for tutorials, rejecting your binary at some point in the future. Once uploaded, you can test your IAPs, and make sure all your purchasing processes work. Looks like the app was submitted in order to provide a live testbed and may have gotten approved inadvertently.

After consulting with the TUAW team, our take on this is “likely sample code accidentally deployed to App Store” by Apple and then quickly pulled once people took notice. TUAW reached out directly to the developer we suspect was behind the app upload before it got pulled.

The app was priced at $0.99 and mentioned a post date for June, 9, 2009, which was during Apple’s WWDC conference and prior to the introduction of in-app purchasing.

{via MacRumors}

So it’s been about four days now and I’ve been using my iPhone 4S and iPad 2 with invisibleSHIELD wrapped ever since. The application to the iPad was a little trickier than the iPhone due to the larger real estate and the curvature of the back of the iPad. However, while it took a little extra time to apply the end result was the same, a clear, firm, almost invisible protective covering for both my devices.

Over the next few days the invisibleSHIELD has taken even better hold to both devices and on the iPhone especially both the front and back cover are now like a second skin providing an even better grip and feel to the ‘nude, iPhone.

My iPhone has been through all the usually handling that it usually gets, in and out of pockets, in and out of cup holders, a range of stands and even through the playful hands of my young daughters and the invisibleSHEILD is showing no sign of wear and tear.

Despite my previous experiences with screen protectors the installation of the invisibleSHEILD and the protection that its given to my iDevices I would without hesitation recommend the invisibleSHIELD for your iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch or any of the hundreds of devices that they build protectors for. There may be cheaper alternatives out there but with invisibleSHIELD you are getting a lifetime of quality.

Read part 1 of the review here.

What we like:

• Screen protection
• Good grip

What to know:

• Application can be tricky

A new job listing on Apple’s website reveals the Cupertino company is currently revamping its Maps application for iOS. The listing is for an iOS Maps Application Developer who will “develop sophisticated user interfaces” and “add new and innovative features.” The Maps application that comes built-in to iOS has been begging for an update for some time. While it has seen new features here and there since it was first launched with the original iPhone, there is yet to be any significant changes.

The job listing would suggest a major revamp for the Maps application is one the way; including a new user interface and some brand new features. Apple has already made it clear from previous job listings that it is looking to take Maps “to the next level,” and the latest listing shows they mean business.

The full posting reads:

Come work for the team that revolutionized the mobile technology industry as it continues to define what computing looks like in a post-PC era. The Maps team is looking for a proactive and hardworking software engineer to join our team. Along with excellent skills in object-oriented software design and programming, the successful candidate will have real-world experience developing sophisticated user interfaces. Excellent communication skills are also a must, as you will be collaborating closely with Apple’s peerless human interface team to add new and innovative features.

Apple stated in a recent press release that it is currently developing navigation software for its iOS devices, which we would expect to see integrated into the Maps application. However, Apple said navigation features would come within the next “few years,” so we shouldn’t expect that anytime soon.

It’s possible that a revamped Maps application will launch with Apple’s iOS 5 software expected to be announced at WWDC this June. While it won’t include navigation features, it may still boast significant improvements and a new user interface.