Expedia has updated its Expedia Hotels & Flights (free) app to version 3.2. Previously capable of helping users compare hotel and flight prices, the app now features local experts that can help users book reservations and find activities in Orlando, Las Vegas, and Hawaii, as well as synchronized FlightTrack integration for FlightTrack app users. Notably, the app is universal with a unique workaround for its still-in-progress iPad flight-booking interface: when switching from hotel search to flight search, the iPad app animates a transition to using an iPhone, right on the iPad screen. The updated app also offers more low-cost flights, and more countries, as users in India, Malaysia, Sinagpore, and Thailand can now book flights.
Microsoft’s digital notebook Microsoft OneNote has updated its free app for iPad and iPhone to version 2.0. The app improves formatting and consistency across devices, and allows users to create or edit tables. Notes will now sync automatically to SkyDrive Pro and SharePoint. It’s also easier to view and find notes, with updated navigation and full page view. Ink annotations and rich text formatting are also now available.
Pandora Media has released version 4.4 of its free Pandora Radio app. The updated claims to improve playback buffering, to keep music “stutter-free” even when dealing with a shaky connection. Also, muting a phone now automatically pauses the music. Additionally, URLs that work on Pandora.com will now “work just as well” on an iPhone.
Affordable and easy to use for optical character recognition, Pixter Scanner OCR ($4/$1) from Quanticapps has updated to version 2.0. The app is now available on the iPad, and its interface has been updated — it now resembles the look of iOS 7, thanks to font and icon changes that borrow from Apple’s upcoming operating system. You can scan a document using the iOS device’s camera, crop it to spotlight the portion of a page you want turned into text, and then wait a few seconds for the text to appear in editable form. Pixter now supports a variety of new languages, as well: Arabic, Chinese Mandarin, Dutch, Finnish, Japanese, Korean, Portugese, Russian, Swedish, and Turkish.
