Foursquare 1.7 for iPhone Available NOW

The much talked about new version of Foursquare for iPhone 1.6 was accidentally made available in the Apple iTunes App Store over the weekend and then pulled immediately, with Foursquare saying that their system was not ready. As a result all versions of Foursquare for iPhone were removed from the App Store until Tuesday when they re-released the previous versions as v1.6.1, which is higher than the version that was released on the weekend.

This morning (HK time) Foursquare again relaunched the new version as v1.7. Below are the side by side comparisons of what’s different between the old and new versions, looking at the revised UI designs.

Gone is the old landing page, with the new version when you start the Foursquare app on your iPhone it will return to the last screen it was on when you left.

The order of the buttons at the lower toolbar has been reworked. The first icon now shows the friends’ latest checkins

Next is the icon that shows the near by Places the user can check into.

After that is the Tips icon which shows the Near By tips and My To Dos.

The old More icon has been replaced with an icon with the user’s name on it. It shows the user’s Profile with history of checkins and access to the user’s list of friends. The previous Badge icon had been removed from the lower toolbar and now the list of earned badges are accessible from user’s Profile screen.

The venue screens have been reworked a bit to align with the new UI design. Some of the functions that were available on these screens are now hidden within an option button at the top right corner of the screen.

The ladder screen has received the similar UI refresh to align with the new design.

Same UI refresh was applied to the Badges screen.

Here are some of the other screen in the new version (v1.7).

Overall this new UI design is a welcome change. The light colour scheme aligns better with the traditional Web2.0 style applications, but the lighter colours may also consume more power on the iPhone.