The Apple iOS app most badly in need of an upgrade was Calendar — and it’s getting one in iOS 7. And some of the coolest and most useful features in the new Calendar were, as I noted earlier, clearly borrowed from some third-party calendaring apps. One of those that provided some inspiration is Sunrise, and the small New York-based team is fighting back by almost immediately launching a new set of features that iOS Calendar doesn’t have (yet).
On Monday morning, version 1.4 of Sunrise hit the iOS App Store and with it comes even more useful integration features that help make Sunrise an easy-to-use, all-encompassing, dynamic snapshot of your day.
In addition to integrating Facebook, Google Calendar and LinkedIn into the app (and local weather and birthdays) Sunrise is adding two more: Foursquare and Crunchbase.
The Foursquare integration is no surprise: Sunrise founders Pierre Valade and Jeremy Le Van are former Foursquare designers. What this will mean for Sunrise users is that check-ins to the Foursquare app on your iPhone will show up retroactively on your Sunrise calendar. So if you ended up at a great late-night spot you can’t remember the name of — but you checked in on Foursquare — if you look back at Sunrise for that day, you’ll see where you were and when.
The Crunchbase integration is aimed at business users. The database of companies will be available right inside the app. So if you’ve entered the name of the company you’re meeting with in Sunrise it will call up additional data about that person/company without forcing you to leave the app.
There’s also going to be a slightly better way of displaying Google Maps information: instead of selecting your meeting’s location and getting pushed out to the Google Maps app, you can now see the location on a map right inside Sunrise.
It’s a small update overall, but I like how quickly the team responded to Apple’s notable advance in native calendaring.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
- The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
- Survey: How apps can solve photo management
- The fourth quarter of 2012 in mobile