The 2011 iPhone application from the Royal Horticultural Society - Grow Your Own – is designed to help you choose and grow fruit and vegetables - however much space or time you have. The base application is free and covers the 20 most popular varieties of fruit and veg. Within the application itself you can buy additional content bundles (for £1.79 each) to extend the content of the app.
We have listened to feedback on the 2010 version, and are now making all functionality available for free on the 20 basic fruit and veg profiles.
For Users who purchased Version 2.0 last year with an in-app upgrade, you will be able to upgrade to the new version for free, and the RHS will give you Vegetables 1 and Fruit as a thank you for your loyalty and feedback.
For those living in the San Francisco area, Elbatrop Ltd. has an app for the iPhone and Android platforms which allows you to walk up to any tree in San Francisco and find out what the name of the tree you are looking at. The app provides both the common and botanical names of the tree. The App uses the data from the City's tree database and provides information for over 60,000 trees in the city.
Columbia University, the University of Maryland, and the Smithsonian Institution are working on visual recognition software to help identify species from photographs. Leafsnap is the first in a series of electronic field guides being developed to demonstrate this new technology. This free mobile app helps identify tree species from photographs of their leaves and contains beautiful high-resolution images of their flowers, fruit, petiole, seeds, and bark. Leafsnap currently includes the trees of New York City and Washington, D.C., and will soon grow to cover the trees of the entire continental United States.