Submitted to Apple on September 17th it has only taken some five days through review and approval until TAXIRUF hit the App Store!
TAXIRUF is a genuinely simple and straight forward application: It solves the problem of being in a foreign city maybe not even knowing where exactly you are and being in need of a cab.
Right after starting TAXIRUF it offers to locate you (either through cell phone towers on a first generation iPhone or leveraging the GPS capabilities of the iPhone 3G) and immediately offers you to call the local cab company.
While this might seem like just another what's-near-me sort of iPhone application TAXIRUF's differentiation comes within the details:
Most - if not all - of the currently available location based apps take your location and perform a web services lookup against publicly available APIs of Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, Flickr and others. The problem with this full text search based approach is that the results returned by these services are not controlled by the application vendor.
These applications might very well return a pizza delivery service when you're in need for a cab just because in Germany many pizzerias do have "pizza taxis" - so a web services based search for the term "taxi" and your location returns these entries, too. Not of very much help, or?
Another problem is that these applications do require you to be online. Without a connection to the Internet they instantaneously become useless.
TAXIRUF is different. First it ships with a built-in lightweight database of the German cities and their respective cab companies. The data has been carefully hand selected and does not include delivery services or anything else than cab companies. In deed one of our teams has gone through the time consuming process of taking care that only valid and quality assured data makes it into TAXIRUF.
Second, TAXIRUF works perfectly fine if you're not connected. You've got the option to manually type in your current location and the offline database makes sure that a local cab company is found.
Last but not least TAXIRUF comes with free lifetime updates for the application and the data. While updated versions of the application have to go through Apple's approval process time and again the database can easily be updated right from within the application at any time! At the click of a button your local offline database receives all changes and updates from our web servers.
TAXIRUF combines the best online and offline experience all in a nice, smooth and straight forward iPhone application.
At a price point of only 1.59 € for the application and lifetime updates TAXIRUF yields a return of your investment after just one call to the directory service of your mobile carrier which you did not make!
If you've got an iPhone or iPhone 3G go and grab a copy!