iPhone Article Zone

MyTown

Location based social apps are all very 21st century. Trying to explain the point of an app like this to someone like my dad is a pointless endeavor. Even trying to explain the app to myself gives me a nervous tic. The genre was recently made popular by the app Foursquare, which lets you “check in” at different locations with your iPhone. This repetitive endeavor ultimately leads to you being declared the “mayor” of locations that you visit the most, while also letting you earn various badges telling you how awesome you are for going places. Does this perpetuate our generations feeling of needing constant approval for our actions? Sure does… but at least it makes a game out of it. It’s like learning typing with Typing of the Dead instead of at school.

Booyah takes Foursquare’s mayoral ownership out of the picture and just lets you go ahead and buy the places you go to. Like Monopoly, once you buy a property you collect rent on them. The more popular the place that you go to is, the more rent you can earn on it. For example, I was in Vegas this weekend and bought up some of the nicer hotels on the strip. Currently, my MGM Grand can earn $81,900 at a time while my CVS Pharmacy in Scottsdale only earns me $64,260 at a time. Along with popularity, rent total is based on the level of the structure you have standing there. My MGM is only level 3 right now, but with some upgrades it will not only look better, but will also earn me more. Rent accumulates on each property automatically until it gets to the max total ($81,900 for MGM). Once you reach the max, you have to manually go into the game to collect your rent.

In the meantime, just like in Foursquare, you have to check into places around you in order to buy them and to get points to gain levels. Each level you gain gives you the ability to perform a new action, such as buying another piece of property or giving you a new building to upgrade to. This point total also represents how worthy you are as a person. Each property has its own top 10 list, showing the most worthy of the individuals that own the property. My MGM Grand, although owned by me, is also owned by over 100 other people, most of which have more total points than me.

In the Las Vegas Airport, I explained this all to my dad, and he looked at me with a blank stare. “But dad, you buy up property and make a bunch of money to buy up other property and upgrade your buildings.” “Yes Chris, but why?”

I don’t even have the slightest clue.

In the 70’s, a theory began that stated that if you did something for 21 days in a row, it would become a habit. Given the manic nature of iPhone users, I’d say that this number should be around 4 days. In this case, Booyah has created an app that is just entertaining enough, right off the bat, to make me come back. Now, after a long weekend of exposure, I have to keep going. Do I get any joy out of it? Not really… but it would sure be a shame to waste all the progress I’ve made.

As for recommending this app, I have a few reservations. You will certainly be entertained for a period of time. The graphics are all bright and cheery, and it becomes really fun trying to build up your city. In the end though, there is absolutely no point to MyTown. There is no conclusion to a storyline and no moment where you would say, man, that was a challenge. In fact, the point system itself is somewhat bunk because the game lets you check into as many things as you want, as fast as you want. If you really really wanted to level up quickly, just say pick two places near you and check into them in quick succession. Hell, pick 10 places and alternate… there is no limit to checkins. I’m absolutely certain that some of the higher scores that I’ve seen were just from people doing fake check-ins.

Here’s my warning. Unless you are a genre fanatic, you will play this game and like it for a few days, maybe even a few weeks, but eventually you’ll start to feel like a bum and wonder why you spend so much time collecting rent in your fake town.

“Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski. Condolences. The bums lost. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski? The bums will always lose!”

Chomp

There’s no doubting that the App Store is a big place. In fact, it’s so big that many now struggle to find exactly what they’re looking for, and with the iTunes App Store search only able to pick up keywords, finding a certain app from a certain developer can be a challenge. Chomp aims to fix that by narrowing the search down to applications it thinks you may like, based on applications you’ve reviewed.

Similar to Apple’s own Genius, Chomp takes searching for applications to buy back to basics, providing a wide and varied outlook on the general opinions of App Store customers. Once you’ve created an account which is both free and quickly achieved, the app is split up into 4 main sections. These include: Live app reviews, recommendations, add people and bookmarked apps.

Live app reviews is really the aspect which makes Chomp stand out. Sure, there are other social apps which display apps based on user aspects, take Apple’s iTunes Genius service for example, which was introduced a few months back now. This takes applications you’ve bought from the App Store, scans them, and results a slurry of apps it thinks you’ll like based off what apps you currently have and tend to use. Live app reviews in Chomp are just as they sound. Using clever jiggery-pokery, Chomp allows you to see a live stream of user iTunes App Store reviews, specific to each individual application. These are then filterable via three categories: Everyone, Following (the people you’re currently following on Chomp,) and You (reviews you yourself have submitted). For each live review shown, the person’s iTunes username, along with the app category and time the review was published to the store is displayed.

Tapping any one of these reviews brings you to a more detailed panel, showing the love to hate ratio of the reviews submitted by the users, and ability to find out more about the application, share, bookmark and of course buy or review the app yourself. From here you can also drill down further to reveal the user behind that certain app review, and follow them if you feel the urge.

The next section in Chomp is of course, Recommendations. Here, the app will delve into the reviews you’ve submitted to the store, and based off the mood of the review will determine what apps you like, dislike or down right hate with a vengeance. From here, Chomp will then display the 11 most popular apps if thinks you might like to checkout, shown in this ‘Weather.app’ esque card fashion. This section is also filterable in two ways: Price and Category. In Price you can narrow the results down from All to Paid and Free, and in Category you have the option to see All Recommendations or view them by Category. Don’t like a recommendation? .. Hit the cross button on the top right of each card. Doing so will tell Chomp you’re not interested with the app stating “We won’t recommend you this app again” and offering to fetch the next app available. Now, while I found this system worked for the most part it was a little clunky. Mainly I think due to some of the recommendations not seeming to match what I’d previously reviewed. Ever get that feeling an app is blatantly guessing? .. Yeah. I’d like to see a future update rectify this, if possible.

Adding people to your ‘Chomp’ network is pretty painless. From the main menu tap ‘Add People’. Here you can add people via Facebook, App Celebrities (a selection of influential people in the iPhone space .. albeit in Chomp’s own opinion), Top Reviewers this Week (top users in Chomp’s network), via Search or Recent Followers. Need to get a friend to join Chomp? You can also shoot an e-mail invite or invite via Facebook, straight from within app. The last section is of course Bookmarked Apps. This section of the app displays all the apps you’ve bookmarked on your travels. Got no bookmarks? Tap the ‘Find apps you’ll love button’ to we whisked off into apposphere.

Summing up, while Chomp provides a real-time outlook on user feedback to a number of applications on the store, I found during use that the app was a little user intuitive. While the app does boost a similar UI to that of the official Facebook app, certain elements and sections of Chomp felt slightly clunky. For example searching for some well know App Store titles didn’t seem to return the results expected, and alongside this, some of the apps button placements didn’t seem to feel right for the type of function expected. With all that said though, Chomp is a welcomed addition to any app-addicts life, and definitely a unique idea, providing a true insight into what customers really think of apps on the iTunes App Store.

Tweet N’Go Pro

Tweet N’Go is another Twitter application. With there being so many now in the app store is it possible for an app to take center stage? Could this be a Twitter app that would wow users away from the one they currently use? With most of them now following the same format, it would have to be a very high quality app and one that could potentially offer users something new or unique. Additionally, with Tweetie 2 being highly anticipated, new Twitter apps have their work cut out for them. Let’s have a look at what this one can offer…

Tweet N’Go Pro is described by the developers as being appropriate for the light user. It seems to want to corner the market on having an easy to use interface, so someone new to Twitter could get into it a lot easier. With that in mind though I’m not sure anyone who was a light user would pay the $2.99, but I want to check out the features and see where it has its strengths.

Good things this app offers…

The buzz most people are looking for: Push Notification for which you can alter the settings in the main phone settings panel. (When I tested this app, I did get DM’s and Replies, but I didn’t see any notifications. This may be a time delay or just wasn’t working at the time of testing.)

SEARCHING: The search feature in the main timeline window is great. Though it doesn’t remember your searches (not even what you just typed in!). The search results opens the users timeline and also has the options to reply, Retweet or Direct message them. You can also favorite their tweet. Also nice is you can click on each tweet in their timeline and the options then appear specific to that tweet, essentially so you can reply to a specific tweet which is nice. You can also unfollow the user from that window too.

INBOX AREA …

REPLIES: If you click on the second icon in, it brings you to your “Inbox”. Here at the top of the screen you have the choice between viewing your replies (default) or clicking on to any direct messages you may have received. If you do click on one of the replies in this list it then shows you the previous conversation that they are replying to. You can then also reply to them etc… all the normal options are there. This was a little slow to load initially.

DIRECT MESSAGES: The DM screen is in list format like so many other apps, and is not in my preferred ‘conversation style’ but it is still unique in that on the tweet that you click, you can DM them or go to their profile. That’s a nice touch.

You can then also see any tweets that you have favorite’d. There did seem to be an issue where some of them appeared 3 times, but it’s a minor issue that can be fixed and doesn’t really make any difference to the app.

WORLD: Fourth icon in was the “world”. This is actually a nice thing that most of the Twitter apps seem to miss out on having. It’s nice sometimes to just take a step back and read what everyone else is tweeting. This is especially great for a new user because it can be so difficult to get started, and into the idea who you follow is how your timeline will look. This also seems to be a chosen feed from latest news. I liked that they made a decision to give users what will essentially be both a ‘clean’ and useful stream.

FEEDBACK: Lastly and again unusually, they have a link to feedback on the main screen (last icon). This is a nice thing to have if they use it and read the responses they get.

Not sure why they decided to include Yelp into the screens as something for you to click. Maybe they have had some feedback that people are after this feature? For me it didn’t actually do anything but maybe it does something impressive for other users.

Some things that weren’t so great…

PHOTOS: When I tried to take a picture to include in the tweet, once the pic was taken the app crashed & closed. When I then went to tweet the message again, it was gone which was disappointing. Many of the apps, if they do quit unexpectedly, still have your tweet ready to be posted.

Also – you seem to be only able to send photos from the camera and NOT from your camera roll. No Camera roll? WHA? This is just a really bad omission and needs to be fixed / implemented.

Not sure how I can see my own profile as well or my timeline… that maybe would be a better use of that end icon instead of the feedback feature which I’m not sure many people will use.

Again, I might just be being picky but there is a weird delay or something about the way the keyboard & tweet screen opens when you select to write a new tweet. Again that’s just minor but now when we have access to so many high caliber Twitter apps, and so many free twitter apps, I think we are demanding near perfection if we are going to pay nearly three bucks for it.

In terms of design, they are using the standard UI elements in the iPhone SDK and it could use with making something a bit more unique or polished really. When you start charging for an app users demand more, and I think a few custom UI elements would be far nicer.

FROM API?! EEK! Lastly – for me personally, I won’t be using the app unless they change / fix that when you post something it says “from API”. For me this is a total killer and I don’t want that in my Twitter stream. Most twitter programs have “from Tweetie” or “from Echofon” etc, but as soon as I see “from API” I just think it’s from some feed or generated tweet. I have actually unfollowed some people if it’s all API, I just think it’s generic generated tweets. This is a total app killer for me and was so disappointed when I saw it.

Worth noting that there is only support for one account, but they do say it is for the light user, so I don’t think someone would expect this feature.

OVERALL…

This is a tough call, as I was using it, I was thinking that this is actually a pretty good contender, I liked some of the features it offered and was thinking they may have some nice unique app features here. I LOVED the search at the top, that’s a real winner. I also liked clicking on a tweet and it brings up the user information. But the “from API” really did completely put me off it and I won’t be tweeting from it at all.

I hope they fix the few issues with it and keep at it because it does have potential, but try the Free ad supported one first.

(please note all pictures are from their website and not my personal twitter account)