Apple and Location-based apps?
Apple has recently filed a patent with details for location-based apps. These location based apps will automatically appear on your home screen when your phone senses that it is in a specific area. 
What does this mean for the end user?
Well let’s just say that you get that spontaneous urge to go out for dinner one night with your special someone, so you don’t have reservations to that fancy restaurant and you want to know what the wait time is, what do you do? Most people would have to pull up to the door or park their vehicle and go inside to ask a host or hostess. But with your iPhone you might one day be able to skip that hassle and idle in the parking lot while an icon displaying the wait time autonomously pops up on your home screen, now you glance at your phone and you can quickly decide whether or not the food is worth the wait or not.
Another way this can help is if you are a college student or an avid reader. Have you ever been in the public library and wanted to find that certain book but all of the computers with the card catalogues are in use by other patrons what do you do? Are you going to patiently wait for someone to get up? Well with this technology you can whip out your iPhone and open up a new app that will display the card catalogue for that library.
(via: Patently Apple)
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Sounds pretty much like a push notification to me. Knowing Jobs he’ll find a way to make it sound like he just invented sliced bread.
@ Murani I agree, i’m thinking that it will throw up a notification stating that there are location-based apps the user can install. Otherwise it would be a bit weird for apple to silently install these apps, what would you think if you were to look down at your phone and see a new icon there and you have no clue how or why?
I am incredibly thankful for our perceptive and intelligent readership. I’m just glad I wasn’t the only one that saw this. I’m sure Microsoft is waiting on the “live tile” patent as we speak, making this ridiculous patent war spin just a little more out of control. I like chaos.
@ Matt I agree chaos is always fun. Did you hear about the big investigation that apple (or steve jobs) asked for, about the guy that found and sold that prototype iphone? I might have to write something up on that.
Right now there is more litigation flying around apple than there are douche bags, which is a feat in and of itself. I would hate to be on legal retainer for apple right now. Those guys have their work cut out for them. The patent trolling losers in Cupertino are about to get sued all over the place. Whether any of these claims represent something substantial is not even relevant. With the number of cases out there now between HTC and even that one asian screen company that has sued them for the second time now they are going to be dumping quite a bit of that profit into legal battles.