Urbanspoon has launched a major revamp for the 2.0 version of its iPhone app, now with a much greater emphasis on visual elements and user snapshots, better personalization options to help diners find the kind of restaurant they want, new round-ups of top choices in each city, and the addition of filters for fine diners, showing James Beard culinary award-winners and nominees.
The new app makes better use of a user’s own history of check-ins and what is trending near them, weighing these factors against either the most blogger or critic activity, or simply thumbs up/thumbs down user votes. Diners can also quickly discover which restaurants have availability or are open at the current time, sort restaurants by price and even “wishlistd” establishments that users haven’t yet been to but are interested in, gathering community information on them.
In addition to James Beard award winners and nominees, Urbanspoon now integrates editorial choices from Eater and the Village Voice, the former making a “top 38” list of “essential” restaurants for every city, with the latter supplying review content from its food critics. Restaurant blogger reviews are also highlighted as before.
A new mapping feature creates an interactive map that filters restaurants by various criteria such as price, cuisine, popularity and other factors. Users can move the proximity pin to another area to explore possibilities not immediately around them. The popular “slot machine shake” randomising conditional restaurant chooser is also retained in the app, but the rest has received a UI overhaul to bring it more in line with the iPad version of the app.
The iPhone version of the app is available free from the App Store now. A free iPad version is also available.
