Find Starbucks 0.8.0

Find Starbucks 0.8.0 is out! This is a major update with many exciting new features and usability improvements:

1. The application now supports all countries and regions where Starbucks has retail stores. Now you can find Starbucks locations in Beijing, Moscow, Mexico city, and many more exciting places around the globe!
2. Driving/walking directions are now available for the following countries: Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Poland, Portugal, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and United States. Directions for more countries will be available in the near future.
3. Faster, more accurate, and more reliable location fix by using both native and Skyhook location providers cooperatively.
4. Fault tolerance improvement by using alternative search methods in case store information cannot be retrieved from Starbucks.

Enjoy!

Find Starbucks in the news!

Boston Globe article

Mobile Marketer article

Screen shots

Click on the image below to open Picasa web album for the upcoming version 0.8.0 of Find Starbucks:

Starbucks web site down -> Find Starbucks store search down

Today Starbucks web site was down with the following information displayed on www.starbucks.com:

	The Starbucks Coffee Company website you are attempting to reach is temporarily down for maintenance. We apologize for any inconvenience, and appreciate your patience as we improve our site. Please check back at a later time.

Unfortunately, the Find Starbucks Android application gets store information from the website. As a result the store search feature for the application was broken. Because of this event I got a one-star for the application because a new user could not use it. I wish I could pass the one-star to Starbucks but I guess they were experiencing some major website problems. Hopefully we can know more in the near future...