Are you planning a summer vacation but you’d like input from your friends before your book? Check out TripShare, an iPad app that lets you create and share your itineraries before you book them.

Once you sketch out a plan, you can share it plans with friends who can then give you feedback on your plan and make suggestions to your travel plan. You can then make edits to the itinerary based on your friends’ suggestions. Once you have the trip in mind that you’d like to take, you can price and book your trip through various online travel agencies — Expedia, Fly.com, Homeaway and Viator — without leaving the app.

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The Melon headband is a brain-sensing device that monitors brain activities while you are studying, dancing, or just doing yoga to help you track your progress and productivity.

At Melon we are really interested in the idea of Understood Self, which we are trying to add to the movement of Quantified Self. We want people to have a great feedback system for the data we’re capturing, so it can help with the activities users already do day-to-day, go beyond numbers and scores, and move towards insights and understanding.

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Mobile app developer skobbler has updated the Android version of its maps app ForeverMap 2 adding turn-by-turn navigation which is available both online and offline. In doing so, the company has renamed the GPS Navigation & Maps and added a feature that lets users get directions to where they are going with voice guidance.

Here is more from the press release: “The update combines the one-of-a-kind map features users love from ForeverMap 2, with skobbler’s GPS Navigation 2, the internationally renowned mobile navigation solution with over 3.5 million users on iOS alone, while enhancing aspects of both to create a standalone, next-generation orientation solution.”

“By adding voice guided, turn-by-turn navigation to what was previously a maps only experience, we’ve not only evolved ForeverMap 2, we’ve also fundamentally transformed the orientation landscape on Android,” stated Philipp Kandal, co-Founder of skobbler.

The New Yorker has introduced a new online receptacle where sources can share documents and messages with the magazine anonymously. The tool is called Strongbox and it is accessible using the Tor network, a private and secure online network.

The publication will not record the I.P. address or any browsing information from people who share documents on Strongbox. It will also not try to access your computer or operating system, and they will not add cookies to your browser.

Here is more about Strongbox from The New Yorker‘s website:

It was put together by Aaron Swartz, who died in January, and Kevin Poulsen. Kevin explains some of the background in his own post, including Swartz’s role and his survivors’ feelings about the project. (They approve, something that was important for us here to know.) The underlying code, given the name DeadDrop, will be open-source, and we are very glad to be the first to bring it out into the world, fully implemented. Read more

When Hollywood producer Neal Edelstein set out to make Haunting Melissa, a horror film iPad app about a teenage girl that goes missing, he didn’t want it to be just another film. The first directorial production from the producer of Mulholland Drive and The Ring, the film was created the specifically for the iPad.

“The story was designed with the technology in mind,” Edelstein told AppNewser last week over coffee in New York. ”It’s a ghost story that was designed to be watched in the dark with headphones on.” Read more

Video editing app Magisto, a tool that automatically edits video footage together into films and has been downloaded 8 million times across Android & iOS, announced two Google integrations this week. The app now has integration with Google+ and is now available as a native Chrome app.

As a Chrome app, the tool will work whether a user is online or offline, as it functions more like traditional desktop software. ”The value of the mobile ecosystem is growing, but not necessarily in the way people think,” stated Oren Boiman, CEO of Magisto. “People are looking for quality over quantity at this point.” The Chrome app will be  part of Google Chrome’s packaged app platform that launches later this year.

Apple has recorded more than 50 billion app downloads from the App Store. The person that was lucky enough to download the 50 billionth app will get a $10,000 gift card to the App Store gift. The 50 people who downloaded apps after the big winner will each get  that each a $500 gift card.

Apple tweeted the news yesterday afternoon, after they hit their goal.

We just hit 50 billion app downloads. Thank you. It couldn’t have happened without you. #50BillionApps tw.appstore.com/hgE

— App Store(@AppStore) May 15, 2013

The company hit this benchmark the same day that Google announced that Google Play has just crossed 48 billion app installs.

There are plenty of apps that will let you scan the barcode of a consumer product good to find out details about that product and how to get a good deal. But now there is an app that applies the same technology to your social consciousness. Buycott lets you look up the ownership structure of any product and trace its roots back to the parent company that owns the app’s interactive family tree diagram.

The idea is to help consumers understand who owns the companies behind the products that they are buying and be able to boycott companies they don’t like and support companies whose policies they support. The scan brings up details about the product and its owners and helps users identify a cause they care about and support the companies on their side of the issue, while avoiding the opposition.

Forbes has more: “There are Buycott campaigns encouraging shoppers to support brands that have, say, openly backed LGBT rights. You can scan a bottle of Absolut vodka or a bag of Starbucks coffee beans and learn that both companies have come out for equal marriage.”

Disney’s ABC Television Group will soon begin testing a new program that will let viewers in the New York City and Philadelphia areas live stream television programming from the ABC app. Beginning tomorrow afternoon, the “WATCH ABC” authenticated service will be available on the app through the end of June.

Here is more from the press release:

The new WATCH ABC service provides viewers for the first time ever with live access to their favorite ABC shows and local market programming, as well as a variety of on-demand content — in more ways than ever before at home and on the go around town. In addition to allowing live linear streaming of viewers’ local ABC stations, the new authenticated WATCH ABC service will include the great, on-demand full-episode viewing experience that the ABC Full-Episode Player and ABC Player app have offered, respectively, online and via tablets and phones.

Online dating site HowAboutWe has released a new dating guide and to promote the Book, the site has produced a series of videos on Vine.

Over the next two weeks, the site will release a series of six-second videos through the video sharing app which reenact different sections of the book Modern Dating: A Field Guide from the Experts at HowAboutWe. For instance, one video illustrates the don’ts of choosing a photo for an online dating profile. (Don’t include a photo of yourself with someone else’s arm around you, don’t pucker your lips and don’t hold a baby).

The book is a dating guide for modern daters and includes advice on when to call, who pays and how far to go on the first date. Here is more about the book from the dating site:

Modern relationships are…complicated. Or so they seem. The dating “rules” of the past — the ones that dictated when and how and what to do in a romantic setting — no longer apply, leaving even the savviest of us feeling slightly disoriented. Dating today feels hard, when it shouldn’t.