It's Friday, and you know what that means: Time to get out of the office and go have some fun. But how do you find out where your friends are, and what's going on in your city? Why, with your iPhone of course!

Going.com lets you find cool things to do in your city, and they've got a newly updated iPhone app out. In addition to telling you about events to check out, people to see, and places to be seen right in your own city, you can share where you are with your friends by updating your status on Facebook and Twitter, right from the app. Once you're there, you can let your friends know what you think about the event with ratings, comments, and photos.

Browse popular events around town, share them with friends, get on the RSVP list, see who else is going and get all the info on where it's going down. Sign up at going.com (or log in using Facebook Connect), get the Going App, and get Going!

Of course, if you'd rather just spend a quiet evening over a dinner and a movie with a loved one, there's an app for that, too. Grab the Moviefone app to find out what's playing, view trailers, and get showtimes and directions to theaters nearby.

Either way, use your iPhone to check out what's going on near you, and have a great weekend!

When I was younger, Friday nights meant getting together with friends and going to see the latest movie that hit the theaters. Back then, GI Joe was a cartoon, not a feature film, and when we wanted to find out what was playing, we called 777-FILM. That's when I was first introduced to The Voice. You know the one; he'd answer the phone with "Hello and welcome to Moviefone. If you know the name of the movie you wish to see, press 1..." Over the years, Mr. Moviefone became enshrined in popular culture with appearances on Seinfeld and burned into the minds of a generation of moviegoers like me. I even got offered a job by Mr. Moviefone once (Seriously. He called me and I half expected him to say, "If you want to work in software, press 1").

Now, of course, when I want to see a film, I whip out my iPhone, and with the Moviefone app, I can find a theater near me with GPS, view trailers, read plot summaries and actor bios, even get behind the scenes or movie premiere photos. It's all very high tech and wonderful and a luxury I couldn't have imagined all those years ago. But I can't help be nostalgic from time to time of the era when finding out what was at the movies meant picking up a phone... and actually dialing. I wonder if years from now, today's kids will look back and think fondly of the time when they used to flick through film listings on their iPhone.

Anyway, if you haven't tried it yet, check out the Moviefone app before you check out what's showing. And as always, let us know what you like and don't like about it. We always appreciate your comments.

See you at the movies!

Epilogue: Another icon of the silver screen when I was growing up was, of course, John Hughes. With films like Ferris Bueller's Day Off, The Breakfast Club and Planes, Trains, and Automobiles to his credit, he helped to define a generation, not to mention made dozens of budding actors and actresses into household names. The movies - or at least my version of the movies - wouldn't be quite the same without Mr. Hughes, and so it seems appropriate to say thanks for making us laugh, for making us cry, and for being part of my life in those wonderful, scary formative years. Rest In Peace, John Hughes.

Wow, the team has been working for months on our newest iPhone App - MapQuest 4 Mobile on the iPhone. You can now get the full power of MapQuest on your iPhone or iPod touch. MapQuest has been on the iPhone for a while as a Web App, but now you can get the next evolution of maps & directions on your iPhone! MapQuest for Mobile on the iPhone allows you to save Maps and Routes on MapQuest.com and retrieve them directly on your iPhone (My Places account is necessary). We've even added a handy MapQuest place carousel at the bottom of the screen to allow you to easily locate hotels, movie theaters, gas stations and much more.

Check out Jarrod's post on the MapQuest blog for more info!



Want more information? Visit: http://wireless.mapquest.com
If you would like to download the feature screenshots, click here. To see the feature-by-feature YouTube video, click here.

Thanks!
Lee Givens
AOL Mac & iPhone Product Lead

As someone who has been watching the mobile industry evolve now for over 10 years it is interesting to watch how the iPhone phenomenon is causing so many industry stalwarts to run in circles chasing Apple's success. Whether the focus is touch screens or shiny black finishes, competitors are trying desperately to copy Apple's moves to achieve their own success.

The latest iPhone-spawned craze seems to be the need for every OEM and mobile operator to launch an application store for their devices.

Of course this is a great thing for the big device brands and for consumers, so the question is why didn't they do this first?

The answer lies with one big advantage Apple has over all other device OEMs (and certainly over any mobile operator) – a simple device support matrix.

Apple has the unique advantage of only having to support a small number of device iterations. As a result of having been in the market longer, the traditional mobile OEMs and carriers have the difficult burden of having to support a wide variety of device types and platform characteristics.

The goal for all App Stores is (or, rather, should be) to provide a one-for-all application download experience to support the OEM / provider's brand. As the number of supported device iterations grows, delivering on that goal becomes increasingly complex.

Apple has, at most, four devices that they need to worry about -- two generations of the iPhone and two generations of the iPod Touch.

Apple's support matrix looks something like this:




Looking at the above table, all four of these devices have the same screen resolution, the same input method (touch screen), the same form factor and button configuration (one button + volume controls) and nearly identical hardware comprising them. So, in practical terms, Apple really has only two, maybe three, devices to support.

Now let's compare that support burden with the next most simple device platform: RIM. If we assume that RIM will focus primarily on their top four device families (the Storm, Bold, Curve and Pearl), they still have an enormous support burden compared to Apple.

Among these four device families, Blackberry devices come in three different resolutions, three different input methods (touch screen, 1- and 2-letter QWERTY keyboards with trackball), two form factors (candy bar and flip), and some variance on hardware (GSM, CDMA, with / without WiFi or external displays).

So Blackberry's device support matrix looks like this:




These two images illustrate the challenge other OEMs have to overcome to create an experience as elegant as the iPhone's. And RIM probably has it the easiest of the rest of the OEMs (excluding Palm, see below). Nokia and Windows Mobile both come in more flavors than ice cream and Android is set to be modified and iterated by any number of OEMs / ODMs so their app store will quickly become fragmented as well.

Palm is perhaps the one exception to this bunch. Palm has made a conscious decision to keep things simple by starting fresh with the Palm Pre. They will have one App Catalog for one device. Of course more WebOS devices will be introduced but I expect Palm to follow Apple's lead by keeping things simple by keeping device specs similar.

The Apple advantage is not unique to the iPhone platform either. If you look at their lineup of laptops and iMacs, it's also incredibly simple. One of the writers at EdibleApple.com has a great post (http://www.edibleapple.com/why-a-simple-product-line-is-integral-to-apples-success/) about how Apple's simplified product portfolio has been a big benefit to consumers. I would add that Apple's approach has also been a big benefit to developers and to Apple themselves.

Here's a big shout out to Apple for paying attention to all the feedback from both customers and developers in announcing all of the good stuff that's coming in iPhone OS 3.0. We're especially excited about push notification, of course (and I bet so are you), but there's a lot of other great stuff that was previewed this week as well. Better media handling, hardware interfaces, more flexible commerce options, and all sorts of other developer goodness is packed in the new SDK. And for users, cut and paste, universal search capabilities, improved parental controls and tethering(!) for users. What more could you want? (Ok, so we could name a couple things, but hey, it's still a very meaty upgrade). For our part, our engineers are already hard at work picking apart the new APIs so our apps will be able to take advantage of the new OS release this summer. I think you're going to like what we've got in store.

Welcome to our new iPhone blog. I was thrilled when the team asked me if I could kick this off by making the first post, until I realized it was probably so that I would leave them alone for a little bit. This blog is where we'll be telling you a little bit about the work I and the rest of the team here do for the iPhone (and of course, the iPod Touch) and get a chance to hear from you with your questions, rants, and hopefully some raves. I'll start it off by introducing the rest of the blogging team here:

• Lee Givens, iPhone and Mac product lead extraordinaire. He's been to more Apple Store openings than anyone I know (I suspect he's been to a majority of them in the US)
• Christina Wick, Engineering Director for Mac products. She's responsible for the team that produces AIM, AOL Radio, ICQ, touchTXT, and SHOUTcast Radio for iPhone. (Yes, all that from one team - and they do Mac software, too)
• Darren Austin, Director of Mobile Products. Darren helps herd the cats here and makes sure that we're able to bring you all the great stuff we've got going at AOL to your iPhone and iPod Touch.

And from time to time, I suspect we'll also hear from:

• Todd Brannam, Chief Architect. You may have seen Todd speak at WWDC 2008, or you might have seen his hand when we launched AIM for iPhone at the Apple SDK launch event last year. When he's not sharing the stage with Apple luminaries, he's cooking up the hot fresh bits that end up on your phone.
• Ron Anderson, Principal Engineer. For the many of you who love AOL Radio for iPhone, you have Ron to thank. Along with one other engineer, Ron built the first prototype for AOL Radio over a weekend, and it was too good not to make into a product.

Over the next few weeks, we'll be talking some about the new products and upgrades we'll be releasing soon, show you what goes on behind the scenes, and we'll continue with the Mac Blog's famous Feedback Friday feature, where we'll answer your questions. And yes, we'll even go into excruciating detail about why AIM for iPhone doesn't support landscape mode (yet). Stay tuned!