iPhone application – Page 2 – Vinko’s Thoughts On…

December 14, 2009

Fashion Lifestyle Brands Going iPhone

With the iPhone’s popularity growing every company out there are trying to think of ways to get in onto the platform and hype. Some of these companies deliver their online services to the iPhone and others used their custom developed iPhone application simply as an advertising tool. The latter are the ones that fail and turns out to be a waste of resources to create.

Now fashion brands are jumping onto the bandwagon with DKNY and Gucci each creating their own iPhone application to promote their respective clothing lines. The former actually trying to offer advice to its users on the Cozy wrap in its iPhone app. Now Kipling is trying to get in on the hype with its Kweather iPhone application. Kipling’s application displays the local temperature, which is not that accurate (not sure of its source), and a built in function to help locate the closest Kipling outlet.

Although all these applications are free, I believe only the biggest fanboy of the respective brands will download these application as they really do not offer too much for the average iPhone user.

I think companies should take the necessary time to analyze the added value of their iPhone application and all associated Use Cases before spending the efforts and resources to create an iPhone application.

December 7, 2009

Review: NASA on iPhone

Missions NASA is an iPhone application released by USA’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

It is loaded with all sorts of information about the past and present missions of NASA, and is ideal for space enthusiasts plus anyone who has a slight interest in space exploration and wants to find out more.

Images Videos The organization of the information presented in the application is very intuitive. One can search the content based on a particular mission or scan through the image and video libraries. While scanning through either of these libraries, one can search using keywords or filter the images and videos by source of the videos.

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November 2, 2009

Review: Shipwrek on iPhone

A friend on Twitter brought Shipwrek to my attention, an application developed by Candy Cane in Estonia.

It is a game with a simple goal. There are two docks: one yellow and one red, the player has to guide the corresponding coloured boats to the correctly coloured dock by drawing course lines on the screen for the boats. When the boats reach the appropriate spot at the dock it will load/unload their cargo. Some boats move faster than others and the trick is not to let any of them collide, if they do the game is over. It is almost like air traffic controller for the sea.

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October 31, 2009

Review: Newsie on iPhone

The Google Reader web client on the iPhone is not bad, it is one of the better web applications from Google aside from GMail. May be that is why there are very few iPhone client made for Google Reader.

Newsie is such a client developed by Instant Voodoo Magic and released in the Apple iTunes App Store this month. It allows users to browse feeds they had set up in their Google Reader accounts.

Newsie presents the list of feeds and folders from the user’s Google Reader account in a list called “Filter News”. This is strange choice of taxonomy, as it is displaying the content normally found in the Feeds section of a Google Reader account. On the “Filter News” screen the user can choose either to look at their feeds based on “Subscriptions” or “Folders & Tags”.

After selecting a feed/filter, the user is presented with all the articles from the chosen feed(s) on the Articles screen. To indicate an article is unread, a green dot appears on the left and the title is coloured green. Clicking on any part of the article summary will bring up the Article Details screen.

On the Articles screen there are 4 icons at the bottom tool bar, which are a bit cryptic. The first icon represents the feeds in the Articles screen, follow by the icons for the list of Starred articles, “My Notes” and Shared articles. Although, these icons may make sense after one finds out what they are for, they can be reworked to make them a bit more intuitive.

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September 29, 2009

Review: SimplyTweet on iPhone [Updated]

Over the years many Twitter clients had come and gone on various mobile phone platforms: iPhone, Blackberry, Android, etc.. Some great ones like TweetDeck, Tweetie, Echofon Pro (formerly TwitterFon) and some flops like TweetStack.

I’m glad to see other developers are still trying to out do its established competitors. Recently I came across such a developer, MotionObj, in the form of SimplyTweet. The version I reviewed here is 2.3.

In the past I had enjoyed the Grouping feature of TweetDeck its ability to synchronize created Groups across multiple TweetDeck clients, and the simplicity of the free Echofon.

SimplyTweet has a simple UI and UX, with many of its features layout logically and readily available.

At the top right hand corner is the icon to allow the user to create a new tweet at the bottom is a toolbar containing 5 icons of your choosing. Both of these are the only constant elements on most of the main screens in SimplyTweet. By default the bottom toolbar has the Friends, Mentions, Messages, Search and More icons shown. You can customized the icons shown in the bottom toolbar by going into More -> Edit button.

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September 10, 2009

Review: Hong Kong Weather on iPhone

HK Weather - Logo I had always praised the talents of Hong Kong iPhone development community. The iPhone application, Hong Kong Weather, from Conceptable is no exception.

You may say, don’t we already have enough weather application for the iPhone. Just going to the Weather section in the iTunes App Store you will find 20 pages of applications in the section. Plus what’s wrong with the default Weather application that came with the iPhone OS? Nothing really, if you live in North America.

The information in the default Weather application comes from Yahoo.com and is not that accurate when dealing with cities outside of North America. The advantage of the default Weather application is its ability to set up weather information for multiple cities, which is great for the frequent travelers. But for those who do not travel as much and live in Hong Kong for an extended period, the default Weather application is fairly basic and borderline useless.

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September 10, 2009

Review: Hong Kong Weather on iPhone

HK Weather - Logo I had always praised the talents of Hong Kong iPhone development community. The iPhone application, Hong Kong Weather, from Conceptable is no exception.
You may say, don’t we already have enough weather application for the iPhone. Just going to the Weather section in the iTunes App Store you will find 20 pages of applications in the section. Plus what’s wrong with the default Weather application that came with the iPhone OS? Nothing really, if you live in North America.

Continue reading “Review: Hong Kong Weather on iPhone”

September 9, 2009

Review: iPhonics on iPhone

I don’t normally review educational software, especially those on the iPhone platform. I think it is mainly due to the demographics who use the devices on this platform.

I made an exception and took a look at the iPhone application, iPhonics, which teaches English phonetics. iPhonics - Home Screen

This application takes the approach of addressing a young audience for a fairly complex subject, the learning of English pronunciation. The entire application accomplish this by treating the lessons as games.The student chooses either to learn By Letter or By Game.

At first glance the games are a bit difficult to figure out without going through the extensive Tutorial section within the game. These tutorials are in English, so student are expected to be able to read English although may not be able to pronounce or comprehend English audio.

Each time an item is clicked on within the application, both a visual and audio feedback results. Fortunately, for the more experienced students the latter can be turned off in the Options screen within the application.

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September 1, 2009

Review: Strokes on iPhone

If you are a golfer and you own an iPhone or iPod Touch, then Bickbot‘s application, Strokes, is for you. It is a simple application that does what it’s designed for perfectly.

The Home screen is split into two sections. The top section shows the number of strokes for a given hole. The bottom section is where the user specify the par of the current hole, increment the stroke count for the current hole and to skip to the next or go back a hole.

One user-centric improvement in the latest version (1.5) is that pars of holes are not reset unless the user changes them manually one hole at a time. This is great for users who plays the same course over and over again. It would be nice if there is an option to save the pars and name it (ie. Golf course name) before overriding them.

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