Category Archives: iphone app reviews

iPhone App Review: Home Screen Wallpaper Maker

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One of the precious few ways which Apple allows its users to customize their iOS devices is by changing the wallpaper, on both the home screen and the lock screen. In fact, as iOS devices become more and more popular, a unique background is sometimes the fastest way to figure out whose device is whose. Not only that, a really cool wallpaper can make you feel like you have a whole new iPhone, even if only for a few minutes.

Home Screen Wallpaper Maker is a nice, free way to create attractive backgrounds for your device. Sure you can just snap a picture and use that for your wallpaper, but this app allows you to customize the pictures before saving them back to the camera roll and selecting them as backgrounds.

Features

The app is simple to use. You first either select one of the many included high-quality backgrounds, or select a picture from your camera roll. Then you can choose to add frames to your app icons, then you save the background back to your camera roll to use as a wallpaper. There is even a random button, though the results may obviously not be to your liking.

Limitations in iOS itself prevent the app from being able to directly change your background, which is why you must save the image first to your camera roll and then select it as a background.

Pros and Cons

The app works smoothly and does a great job of adding the frames to the icon placeholders. The frames add a nice touch of class to otherwise static backgrounds. There is also a nice varied selection of background images to choose from, though you can of course get background images from many other sources.

The only things I wish this app had to offer was the ability to take a picture and use that as a background, rather than having to only choose from the camera roll; and more effects to add to pictures that you choose for backgrounds (some basic color balance effects, brightness and contrast, etc).

All in all, this is a great free app that does a nice job of spicing up your iOS device’s otherwise bland wallpaper.

Home Screen Wallpaper Maker is free, and has minimal ads.

iPhone App Review: 1-Click Flashlight

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One of the most surprisingly useful things my iPhone 4 has is an LED flash. It’s actually terrible as a flash, but I really quickly found myself opening the camera app in order to use the flash as a flashlight. It was only a matter of time before flashlight apps started springing up on the app store.

One app in particular I like is 1-Click Flashlight, a stripped-down flashlight app that does one thing and does it to perfection: give you light.

The LED light comes on within seconds after tapping the icon, and a tap to the otherwise black screen brings up a big blue button. You may think touching the blue button turns the light off but no, you would be wrong. Depressing the blue button causes the LED light to strobe, for the occasional impromptu rave.

This is the app, folks. Touch that and you got strobe.

Those of you with toddlers also know that a strobe effect is always a big hit, though be careful. Strobes are known to trigger seizures in those that are susceptible.

One of the subtly brilliant things about this app is that it does NOT have an off button, and the reason why is that the iPhone hardware already includes one: the home button. Rather than waste screen real estate or user-interface overhead on drawing an off button, the developers just put the built-in feature of iOS to work for them. When you quit the app, the light turns off.

Another small but priceless feature is that the app retains the strobe state when you quit, so if you left it in strobe mode it will be in strobe mode when you start the app again. I’m not sure why you need an LED strobe light so much but hey, there it is.

I should point out that this app replaced my previous flashlight app of choice, which in comparison had a screen cluttered with graphics, buttons, and useless information; and it didn’t really offer anything beyond what this one does.

All in all, 1-Click Flashlight is a terrific slimmed-down flashlight app that doesn’t waste resources on giving you things you don’t need.


iPhone App Review: Health Yourself

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Staying healthy is more than just a matter of going to the gym or running a marathon. It’s also about maintaining a positive attitude, not just about your environment but also about yourself. Mental and spiritual well-being is just as important as keeping your body in shape.

Health Yourself by Kagan Media Net is an app with that same philosophy in mind, intended to give you access to a resource of information on keeping your body, mind, and spirit in top condition.There is a great volume of information within the app itself as well as links to other resources for delving into a topic further.

Features

  • Dozens of topics in the three categories of body, mind, and spirit.
  • Topics covered include disease, addiction, stress, love, general health, and even hair loss.
  • Dozens of additional links on topics such as raw foods, macrobiotics, music, and books for further reading.

Overview

When you first start the app you are presented with a daily affirmation, and the option to view an Intro or go to the Home menu. The Home menu gives you the main access to the categories of body, mind, and spirit, as well as direct access to the additional Links and an About page. Each category takes you to a page with further topics, such as “Create Health”, “Disease”, and “Purpose”. Under the Body category there is even a simple health test to rate your overall health.

Pros

  • The app is structured intuitively.
  • It’s stable, I didn’t experience a single crash or rendering issue.
  • The app’s articles are detailed enough to be interesting but short enough that you can read them quickly. You’re scrolling just a couple of pages at the most for any given article.

Cons

  • Though the app has a lot of great information, it’s basically a string of static pages strung together with links.
  • The app could use more than just information: some way to keep a journal, more interaction such as having programs for personal improvement in each category, basically some way to actually interact with the app rather than just read the pages.
  • A search feature is, in my opinion, necessary in an app like this.

Bottom Line

Health Yourself is a good resource if you are seeking information thoughts on getting and staying healthy. Though most of the information would fall into the “alternative medicine” or “new age” category, most of it is very compelling and could even be considered common sense if you’re not into “new age” spirituality.

One note about the price: I hate that $4.99 is a high app price these days, but that’s just the reality of the app store. A price tag like that is a bit high for something that’s basically a hyperlinked document.

All in all though, if this is the kind of information you’re after, Health Yourself could be a great portable resource and daily reminder about how to stay healthy in all aspects of your life.


iPhone App Review: AppZapp

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There are over 225,000 apps in the iTunes App Store, and the number is growing each day. While the apps available are neatly divided into categories and you can browse by several different criteria, finding anything good in that morass of mediocrity is almost hopeless. Add to that the fact that developers change their prices almost daily, sometimes for only hours at a time, and I think we can all agree that an app like AppZapp can come in handy.

What AppZapp does is track new app submission as well as price changes, so that you can quickly find apps that have dropped in price (sometimes to as low as free). You can also create an account and add apps to one of several lists, so that AppZapp will track price drops on those specific apps and alert you when the price has changed, potentially saving you money. Considering that the app itself is free, it seems like you have nothing to lose, right?

Features

  • Free apps and new apps at a glance.
  • “Price Alarm” informs you of markdowns of your selected apps.
  • Watch list for apps.
  • Full browsing of the app store by category, just like the App Store included on your device.
  • Browse other countries’ app stores, currently including Germany, Australia, Switzerland, UK, and the USA.

Pros

  • Essentially the same App Store, with the included feature of price alarms and watch lists, something Apple’s own app should feature already.
  • Each app includes a price chart, showing the various recent ups and downs in pricing.
  • Some apps feature YouTube videos as well as the standard App Store screenshots. Again, wish the actual App Store app featured this.
  • Includes iPad apps, and the ability to filter and only see iPad or iPhone apps in your lists.
  • Slick and stable, very well designed, attractive icons and intuitive interface.

Cons

  • The app has some random German sprinkled throughout in unexpected places. Tap on the option “Collections” from the main menu screen and you’ll see what I mean.
  • Even though I have English selected, I sometimes see pricing in Euros. It happens very rarely, and seems to only happen when I view the “Sales” screen.
  • The app listings include all information from the App Store, except user reviews. Odd omission, this is the first thing I look at when thinking about buying an app. If pulling the comments is too intensive, at least have the average star rating for the app.

Overall

All in all, AppZapp is a great way to browse the App Store and track apps that you’ve been keeping your eye on. At the price of free it’s definitely worth a look to see if it’s the app for you.


iPhone App Review: Cruise Finder

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I’ve been on a cruise once in my life. The comedy of errors associated with that vacation is a topic for a personal blog post, but the cruise itself was exciting and awe-inspiring. The sheer size of the ship; the constant flow of food, drink, and frolic; and the bizarre juxtaposition of being isolated at sea in a self-contained floating city are exciting and not to be missed.

For those who take frequent cruises or are looking to take a cruise for the first time, the Cruise Finder app for your iDevice is an almost comprehensive database of cruise lines, vessels, departures, destinations, and itineraries. If you want to take a cruise, Cruise Finder bills itself as the app to use. I did not intend for that to rhyme.

Features

  • 20 cruise lines.
  • Over 220 cruise ships.
  • Deck plans.
  • Stateroom photos and descriptions.
  • Over 12,000 itineraries with day-by-day descriptions.
  • Port directions, parking, maps, weather
  • Favorites list, share via email/Facebook/Twitter, hot deals.

Description

The app itself is basically a front-end for iCruise.com, which presumably contains all the data which powers the app. Starting it up you immediately see an offer to register for their newsletter, a link for hot cruise deals, and four quick search links. Scrolling down on that page gives you more options: destination and departure port calendars; cruise info like passport requirements, weather, and port directions; and iCruise links for their mailing address, customer service, and getting a cruise quote.

The data in the app is presented well and navigation is mostly intuitive. There is a huge amount of info on each ship, including staterooms, prices, and deck plans. The port information is useful and gives you information on parking and weather, so you can plan your arrival and departure accordingly. The departure calendar is especially fun to look at, showing the price for departures from your chosen port by month, so you can see at a glance what your home port offers.

Pros

  • Huge depth and breadth of information at your fingertips, provided you have a data connection.
  • You can favorite anything, including itineraries, cruise lines, and specific ships.
  • You can browse by any piece of information, using the same criteria as above.
  • Port parking, directions, and weather are useful bits of information, making the app useful beyond just browsing for cruises.

Cons

  • The opening screen is half-filled with “hot deals” and an offer to register for their newsletter. It’s wasted space that could be taken up with navigation elements.
  • Speaking of navigation elements, two of the six live links on the starting page are redundant: Cruise Finder is repeated at the bottom of the page as Search, and the Hot Deals link appears twice. Again, wasted space, missed opportunity. There is also a Call Us link at the bottom of the page, whose information is repeated behind the lowercase “i” (information) link in the top right corner.
  • The app could stand to include even more information, such as activities available at port and activities available on each ship.
  • One last niggling little detail: if you hit “Quote” while you’re viewing an itinerary you’re presented with a blank form, in which you must enter all of the details from the itinerary which you were just viewing. It would be great to just have the appropriate information already populated in the form, so all you have to do is enter travel date details and hit “send”

Overall

If it looks like the Cons outweigh the Pros, it’s just because the app is overall a great searchable cruise database that has a few annoying interface issues. If you’re looking to go on a cruise soon then this app would be a great place to start.


iPhone App Review: My Face

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In the movie Robots, Bigweld tells aspiring inventors “See a need, fill a need.” That’s essentially the way I feel about apps in the iPhone app store: target a need that you see not being met (or not being met as well as YOU think you can meet it), and home in on that like a laser. My most-used apps do basically one thing and one thing well, and don’t try to be too ambitious.

My Face follows this development model, giving you a simple way to associate pictures with contacts in your contact list. To be more specific, it actually allows you to specify what picture you would like to be associate with your contact info in someone else’s iPhone, provided they are using the My Face app. It’s an interesting idea.

The basic idea is this: within My Face, you assign a picture from your phone to be your contact picture that others see when you call them. They are presumably doing the same for you. So every once in a while you fire up the app and hit “Get Contact Pictures” to see if anyone in your address book has uploaded a new image for themselves.

The app is straightforward: on the settings page you enter your contact info and first and last initial, plus the country you’re in and your carrier. This information is actually what’s needed to match up your picture with someone else’s contact database, presumably by searching for the phone number in their contact list and seeing if the first and last initials match.

My face worked flawlessly for me ; I tested it rather accidentally since I have myself in my contact list (don’t ask), so when I hit “Get Contact Pictures” after saving all my settings it assigned the pic I had just chosen as the contact picture for myself in my own phone. Confusing, I know, but it basically did it’s job. I tested it as well on another handset and it worked perfectly there too.

One negative mark against it was the setup. At the time I felt like I was entering a ridiculous amount of information, and then after sending that in I had to click a link in an SMS in order to validate the info. All for a contact picture? Looking back on it though it took all of twelve seconds and wasn’t that big a deal at all.

The other issues of course is that everyone you know must have this app installed in order for it to work.

My Face is a useful little app that does one job and does it well. It’s free and has iAd within the app. Right now you may not know anyone that has the app installed on their phone, but the only thing stopping your contact list from filling up with pictures is widespread adoption, so go ahead and give it a try!


iPhone App Review: NeoWORX

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Tracking usage statistics for your website is critical these days, even for the lowly blogger. Every decent host provides usage tracking tools, even Google has a good free service, but none of those free offerings seem to have any flare.

This is where NeoWORX (the self-proclaimed “Web Counter Specialist”) comes in. More than simply tracking visitors to your site, it offers gorgeous visualization tools in all shapes and sizes to further your understanding of your site’s visitors as well dress up your site. From the developer’s mouth:

“NeoWORX accurately tracks the visitor traffic of your blog, website or social page and displays it in many different ways. You can follow your blog’s past or present traffic by country or city, by unique visitors or page views. Click a country and see what cities visited you. Click a city and display a map of its location. You can visualize your visitors on a mesmerizing animated Earth globe. Rotate it as you like with your fingers. Zoom in or out with great ease. Watch you past visitors as yellow dots of varying sizes and your online visitors as red pulsing circles. You can analyze your valuable visitor data in great detail and obtain useful statistics. Display a “heatmap” of your world traffic. List your top 50 visiting countries. Follow your traffic progression day after day.”

It’s predominantly eye candy to be sure, but eye candy never hurt anyone, especially if it’s presenting accurate and timely content in a way that’s fun and intuitive to use. So is it?

Features

The iPhone app gives you access to roughly the same information available on the website, which is basically global visitor traffic information, dissected into various different analytical chunks:

  • Summarize – Recent visitors broken down by city, time visited, pages visited, currently online, and online in last 24 hours.
  • Visualize – A Google Earth-style spinning 3-D globe that shows your traffic as dots throughout the world. You can stop the globe, spin it, pinch-zoom in and spread-zoom out.
  • Analyze – Displays total traffic, traffic since last connection, Top 50 Countries graph, a visitor density map, and a visitor progression chart of the entire year.
  • Detailed manual and help info.
  • Account info page.
  • Even a world flag quiz!

Pros

  • The app is slick and simple, giving you just the usage information you would need on the go.
  • It highlights very well the strengths of the service that NeoWORX provides.
  • Data is well presented and easy to understand.

Cons

  • There is an annoying startup musical sting when you open the app. That should really just go away, it serves no purpose.
  • The spinning globe “Visualize” data toy is very fun, but zooming in to see data points is basically useless. You get closer to the yellow dots on the globe, but no further data is presented. It would be nice to at least see city names with the yellow dots.
  • There are a handful of random misspellings, both within the app and on their website. These things happen, and it may have to do with their being based in Europe (maybe these are European spelling vs American English spelling differences?), but little bugs like that can give a prospective customer the wrong impression.

Overall

NeoWORX offers a useful set of visitor tracking tools, presented in a fun and beautifully interactive package to display on your website. The iPhone app gives you a window into that data and a little taste of the visual magic that you get on the full website.

The app is free, but the service is not. You get a 14-day trial (which requires NO up-front payment information) and thereafter must choose from a few reasonably-priced service levels to continue using the widgets.


iPhone App Review: GolfMoolah

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Acey Deucey. Bingo, Bango, Bongo. The Snake. If any of these phrases mean something to you (with the caveat that it has something to do with golf), then you may be in need of GolfMoolah.

GolfMoolah takes golf scoring apps deeper into your pocketbook by tracking not just the strokes, but also the results of any number of different side games you may have going on the round. Suffice it to say that none of this makes any sense then this may not be the app for you.

Features

  • 18,000 United States golf course database
  • Several of the most popular golf wagering games
  • Detailed rules for each game
  • Add courses or edit included courses
  • No annual fee or subscription
  • Automated scorecard tracks all wagers and results for multiple games
  • Email scorecards from within the app
  • Settle wagers via Paypal
  • Calculates handicap for each golfer based on USGA rating & slope

Pros

The app is designed well, leading you from the first screen step by step through the necessary details to create a round of golf. You can start off by simply creating a new round, then select a course, then add players. You are finally presented with the standard golf scorecard, at which point  you can select the side games you would like to play.

Keeping score is accomplished by simply tapping on the hole and entering the score for each player, just as easy as you would expect. The app tracks the information given and applies it to each game as appropriate, taking the bookkeeping out of your hands so you can focus on the game.

One nice feature I noticed is that you can even have different player and team configurations within the same round of golf. For instance, in Bingo Bango Bongo you are all playing solo, but in Las Vegas you play on teams of two. You can then even have a game of Skins in which only two of the foursome participate. I can only imagine what a nightmare that would be to keep track of with pencil and paper or a standard scoring app, but GolfMoolah handles it with ease.

The scorecard also has a nice option to view the holes by score or by money, letting you see at a glance who is ahead in the score that really counts.

Cons

  • The app apparently has a bug in Nassau (the game, not the island), which the developers have committed to fixing in the next update.
  • The buttons are on the “small” to “very small” side for those of us with large fingers, though it’s not a deal breaker.
  • The app is expensive, at $29.99. This may or may not be expensive to you, given how much or how little you value your time or your sanity in tracking the details of golf scoring and wagering.

Overall

All in all, pricing aside, GolfMoolah is an exceptionally well-done app that has a huge database of courses pre-baked into it that will make scoring and wagering as effortless as possible.


iPhone App Review: You Can’t Always Get What You Want

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Fans of classic rock, rock memoirs, or first-person accounts of free concerts that end in a stabbing should all find something to like in Sam Cutler’s book You Can’t Always Get What You Want.

The iPhone app of the same name is basically the book made into a dedicated app. For less than the price of the paperback or Kindle versions on Amazon, you get the full text of the book plus pictures and videos (including interviews with the author himself, Sam Cutler).

Cutler is a conversational writer, and the book itself is very easy to get into. Even if you have little interest in the Stones (or the Grateful Dead, with which he also toured) you may find yourself sucked into his account of the classic rock era. He writes with a style that is unpretentious and vocal, reading on the page almost like it would be spoken from across the table at a party.

But you can find reviews of the book itself elsewhere I’m sure (and from more qualified literary critics), what I’m really here to talk about is the app itself.

The app starts simply with a quick splash screen and then the menu page. The options are simple: the book is first, as it should be, followed by videos and photos, bookmarks, a link to send an email to the developers for feedback, and a link to buy the book itself from one of several vendors.

Features

  • The book, of course
  • Several different font styles and sizes
  • Autoscroll
  • Bookmarking
  • “Night View” mode
  • “Audio” mode (someone, I presume the author, reading the book aloud along with the text)

Pros

  • The book itself is quite good, a raw look behind the scenes of the events leading up to the most infamous concert in rock history, and beyond.
  • It seems like a small thing, but having bookmarks linked directly from the menu could easily have been overlooked. Good choice.
  • Having several fonts, sizes, night view (reversed colors), and audio is good considering you would have most of those available on the Kindle version for the same price.
  • Lots of photos and videos.
  • Cheaper than the Kindle version by half!

Cons

  • When you start the book portion, and even every time you enter the settings screen, the book automatically scrolls the text for you. You must press pause each time to get it to stop. It’s irritating and unnecessary unless you’re following along with the audio track.
  • When you first start the app there is no indication that you need to tap to get past the title screen. It just sits there staring at you until you do something.
  • The buttons at the bottom menu bar when you’re in the book give no visible feedback that they’ve been pressed.
  • There is no bookmark indicator, such as on typical ebook readers. You can’t tell if the page you’re on is bookmarked without entering the bookmark list.

Overall

You Can’t Always Get What You Want is a great book on its own, packaged into a quality reading app that has a few rough edges to be hammered out. If this is a story that interests you I say save yourself the $5 and get this version over the Kindle, snagging yourself some pictures and videos in the process!


iPhone App Review: Best Biking Roads

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I am not a biker, and some of you may say that disqualifies me from having an opinion on this app. Some of you may even be right, so I won’t try to critique the actual content of Best Biking Roads. Even if I were a biker it would be impossible for me to actually go out and ride all (or even some) of these routes before writing a review, so I’ll stick to just reviewing the app itself.

Gotta love the straightforward start screens.

Best Biking roads is the companion app to the website of the same name. It boasts that it is the largest motorcycle routes site on the web, and has an impressive list of routes to back up that claim:

  • 1306 European routes
  • 215 American Routes
  • 29 Australian Routes
  • 10 African Routes
  • Thousands of route reviews and photos

While the app gives you access to the same information available for free on the website, it is intended to be easier, faster, and of course more mobile to access it in app form.

Features

The Best Biking Roads app features all of the same content as the website, including:

  • Ability to browse routes by text search, pinpointing an area from a map, or just searching your current area
  • Ability to create a route by dropping waypoints on a map
  • Commenting on already established routes in the database
  • Info on each route like length, visibility, hazards, and “police presence”

Pros

The app is quick and easy, starting up with  just a few essential buttons on the main screen (Browse Routes, Create Route, Login, plus a tiny info link and link to the website).

Actually not a good ride. Take 280 instead.

The options to browse are simple and intuitive: tap to search your immediate area, search by entering text, browse a list of areas in the world, or drag crosshairs around a world map and drop it where you want to find routes.

Route details are just like on the website. You can view detailed ratings and comments from riders who have been on the route more recently than when it was first entered in the database. You can also view most routes on a map (though the app currently includes no photos).

Creating a route is actually brilliant. You are first located on the map using location services, then invited to drag the map and drop a pin to start the route. You can drag the map freely and place as many waypoints as you like, then drop an endpoint. As you drop pins the app calculates the appropriate roads to travel to get to those locations, so be sure to drop as many waypoints as necessary to keep your route accurate. After completing the map portion you are then presented with an opportunity to rate the route’s criteria and enter comments on the ride.

Cons

The invisible box covers most of Europe, west to Nova Scotia and south to the Equator.

The app currently has some bugs that do not render it unusable by any means, but do make it sometimes a frustrating experience.

  • Selecting a route by country: this is the option that gives you a map and crosshairs and invites you to drag and select a country. The crosshairs however are bounded by an invisible box that roughly covers the Atlantic Ocean and Europe. As you zoom in closer you can drag around to more of the world map, though the box never quite goes away entirely. It just seems to get bigger.
  • The option to select routes “near me” should have a setting for distance. No routes turn up “near me” in San Francisco, though one of the best routes in the world begins just about 120 miles south from here, in Monterey. If I’m looking for a weekend ride I would probably be willing to start that far away.
  • When you bring up the route list “by area”, then select United States, the resulting list of routes sorted by state name is not quite sorted alphabetically. It almost is, but not quite.
  • Selecting “Washington DC” on the list of state names when viewing routes “by area” brings up a random list of routes from other places (scattered throughout the Midwest and the South).

These are strange little text-handling bugs or quirks that can be squashed easily I’m sure in an update, but right now they’re just strange sauce in an app that otherwise is well thought out and has very useful information.

Overall

Best Biking Roads is a great resource for any biker wanting to find routes nearby or when planning a weekend ride; or for letting the other 11,000+ registered users of the website know about that great new route you just created. Once the bugs are squashed (and maybe photos added?), it will only get better.


iPhone App Review: HoneyDo

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The “honey-do” list has been the bane of every husband’s existence since the dawn of chores. High Five Labs has finally brought that evil scourge into the digital age with HoneyDo, a share-able todo list.

I had to fake-share this list with… myself.

HoneyDo works just like most other standard task list apps out there: you add tasks and due dates, they show up on a list, etc. The difference here is that you can now invite others to partake in your list by hosting a group, or by joining an existing group.

Once the group is established members can add tasks and assign them to other members of the group, complete with due dates and even subtasks. The group members can also comment on tasks and reply to the comments, viewable in the standard “chat bubble” interface. When you assign a task to a group member you can even offer a gift for the completion of the task (cup of coffee, cold beer, cupcake, hugs and kisses), or even inform them that they’ll be in the “doghouse” if the task isn’t completed on time.

Features

  • Host a list or join an already existing list.
  • Assign tasks to members or to “Anyone”, and offer a gift for completion.
  • Calendar integration for iOS4 devices (push notification alerts for prior OS versions).
  • Reject tasks (not a feature currently available in the standard pen and paper honeydo list, at least not that I’m aware of).
  • Reply to tasks, and reply to the replies. Combined with push notifications that’s almost like free SMS messaging.

Pros

To whom should I assign this task?

First of all, and this is no small thing, I love the icon. Okay maybe that is a small thing, but having a beautiful icon on your home screen goes a long way towards keeping an app in circulation.

The interface itself is similarly well designed. The colors are well-chosen and the app functions smoothly and efficiently. There is a slight lag in every tap (very slight), so I assume the app is contacting the mothership at each step in order to keep the data in sync. It’s not a huge problem.

There are very few settings for the app, which I think was a good choice on the part of the developers. Since the aesthetic design for this app seems to be aimed at families (rather than businesses), and the “techno-geek” makeup of a family may be all over the board, having the app be as simple and straightforward as possible is the right move.

That’s not to say that the app is lightweight: it handles what I think would be 99% of what most people want in a todo list application. Having the ability to assign tasks to an individual and discuss those tasks via messaging is what separates this from the rest of the pack.

Cold hard cash if you send those pics… anyone?

The sharing of tasks in general is a great idea and well implemented. You can assign pictures to each of the members of the group, then easily create and assign tasks to each person (or to “Anyone”). Communicating about each task is a great touch; keeping replies about each task within that task itself should definitely keep conflicts and miscommunication to a minimum.

Cons

The app has a few quirks that should be noted, from minor bugs to design choices that I feel detract from the usefulness of the app.

  • It has an “Advanced View” in the settings page, but it seems at this point to do little more than NOT group tasks by their due date and whether or not they’re done. I think the Advanced View idea is a good one for advanced users, but it should be put to better use (or have an entire “Advanced Features” settings page devoted to power users).
  • The interface is a little over-designed in places. In particular the Reply button on the task discussion page looks grayed out, signifying that it can’t be used. I almost didn’t even bother trying it but did, and it worked. There are a few other spots around the app where the design and color choices interfere with standard interface elements and lead to minor confusion, like my example above.
  • No landscape mode. I’m not a HUGE fan of landscape mode on the iPhone, but it does come in handy because of the larger keyboard in the orientation.
  • It would be nice to add the ability to add “Admin Privileges” to other users besides the host, so that others in a group can have the host’s abilities. Parents and coaches, for instance, should be able to edit all tasks and delete users from the group regardless of whether they started the group or not.
  • Minor bug – the first time I tried to change my profile photo by adding a picture from the camera roll, it crashed to the home screen. When I started the app up again it had changed the photo, and that crash never happened again.

The big issue I have with the app overall is that ALL users must have an iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, iWhatever, in order to use it. It has no web interface or client for other phone platforms (that I know of). I, for instance, have three iPhones in my house of varying generations yet I’m the only iPhone user in the family, meaning that my wife and I can’t use the app. It would be nice if she could log into a website and assign me tasks (so that I could reject them, naturally).

Overall

The app is a really well-designed and thought-out app that could prove very useful for any one of a number of different group settings. It would be nice to able to share this group task app with non-iPhone users in the future. But for now if you have an iPhone and some people you know have an iPhone, and you all have a lot of tasks that need to get done (roommates & chores, hello?), then this may be the effortless solution that you’re looking for.