SHAPE Services continues to add new features and fine tune their instant messaging products and platform. Both IM+ and IM+Pro support two more instant messaging services, gain the geeky feel of augmented reality searching, and improve upon existing features.
The United States has Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, AOL, Facebook, and a number of other companies that offer well-known instant messaging services. However, that’s not to say other regions of the world don’t have social-networking systems with tons of users. SHAPE recognizes this fact and has added support for two popular Russian instant messaging services,VKontakte and Yandex IM, to the IM+ apps. And speaking of international user acknowledgement, Portuguese and Dutch join the list of natively supported languages.
Augmented reality on the iPhone was once just a concept tinkered with by developers, and not even allowed by Apple’s SDK policies initially, but is now becoming a pretty common feature for travel, lifestyle, and social-networking apps as a secondary search option. Where has SHAPE implemented AR? They’ve added it as a traditional map replacement to be used on iDevices equipped with cameras for the Neighbors service.