Apple today has expanded its popular Apple Maps Flyover feature to a pair of new cities, while it has also rolled out Spotlight Suggestions to new countries and its traffic data to a single new location. Last month, the company expanded Maps Nearby, Flyover, and traffic data to a handful of new locations, following a more significant Flyover expansion that occurred in February of this year.

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Vimeo is out with a new version of its iOS app today that adds support for iOS 9 features, improves content discovery, makes video sharing faster, and more. iPad users will be happy to learn that Vimeo now supports iOS 9’s picture-in-picture feature for video playback when using other apps. The video service has also tuned up video discovery features and recommendations in the latest version of their iOS app.

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The iPhone podcast app Castro has a lot more competition in the market nowadays since I first reviewed it back in 2013. Arguably, Castro is still the most visually appealing of the current crowd and the developers are currently working on the next major version of the app, Castro 2. In the meantime, the developers have released Castro 1.5 with some new features and a new pricing model. Following Overcast’s lead, Castro is now completely free for all to download. The company is moving to a patronage model.

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As first predicted by 9to5Mac, Apple today announced a revamped version of ts Spotlight search software that will be included in OS X 10.11, called “El Capitan.” The new search system allows users to resize and move the Spotlight window, which presents new types of content.

Sports scores and other Siri data will be suppoted, and natural language search allows users to track down mail messages and documents easily. The search upgrades are also available in apps like Mail and Finder.

Keep reading for a full feature list of the new Spotlight

Rumors that Apple might be creating its own search engine started doing the rounds last fall, when webmasters started seeing web crawler visits from IP addresses starting with 17 – the IP address block owned entirely by Apple. Apple has now officially confirmed in a support document that it is operating its own web crawler called Applebot.

Applebot is the web crawler for Apple, used by products including Siri and Spotlight Suggestions. It respects customary robots.txt rules and robots meta tags. It originates in the 17.0.0.0 net block.

While the wording is clearly intended to suggest that this is just business as usual, both the fact that Apple is running its own web crawler at all, and the somewhat vague wording, are interesting …  expand full story

Command-line fans will be happy today, as Nate Parrot’s Flashlight utility comes out of beta. Flashlight is a utility that enables you to carry out more than 160 different tasks just by typing commands into Spotlight – a kind of command-line Siri for the Mac. Functions include checking the weather, creating notes, adding calendar appointments, translating words, emailing files, sending messages, moving files, ejecting drives and performing image searches.

Apple seems impressed too: it has hired Parrot as an intern on its Spotlight team …  expand full story