iPhone / iTouch and iPad Application Reviews

[Mike]

Sim City on the iPhone. A quality app, just as much fun as I remember from the PC except I have less of an expectation of playing the game well. I still have no idea how people manage to get a city with millions of people in it, I just can't seem to nudge the population above 200k. Still I make a rough living and make a few profits to support the parks and education etc without excelling at any of it.

, I bet this would look amazing on an ipad.

[Mike]

Redlaser. This app will only work on the 3GS and 4 however it is very cool. The app uses te camera to 'scan' barcodes; it then checks the code against online databases such as eBay, Amazon and Play to determine what the online prices are. An excellent idea and it works seamlessly on the three example barcodes I used.

[Mike]

Telegraph iPad app

The Daily Telegraph app for the iPad is a very well laid out and presented app. It is smooth and elegant. All in all it gives you the best articles of the day and allows a local download so you can read when not connected to the net. It has me reading the Telegraph for the first time in years. There are a few items that could be improved as follows.

1) There needs to be an in app purchase to enable a download of the full daily newsaper.
2) An archive of all the purchased newspapers with very old issues being stored on your iTunes account.
3) A method of sharing the article website URL on Facebook or email.

All in all it is a app but only needs the improvements above to make it achieve the coveted final star.

[Mike]

Newsrack

Another rss reader that crashes a lot on the iPhone but is a much better iPad app compared with NetNewsWire which is iPhone / iPod Touch only. The layout is nice and intuitive and makes good use of the full iPad screen. It syncs with googlereader and several other rss news services too.

All in all a app with some room for improvements.

It would be great of they could actually arrange the news feeds in a newspaper article type layout.

[Mike]

Rightmove

This is basically a way of translating the website of www.rightmove.co.uk into the iPhone and iPad native app layouts. The iPhone version is pretty slick but has a limited layout and the refinement options are limited. The iPad version has very good layout with the properties arranged like a set of photographs in an album. The iPad version has some odd swipe controls though and it needs more restrictions on the swipe action for navigation to restrict the screen to moving left and right (not up and down!).

In terms of functionality both apps manage to save favourites to your local device for future reference. Unfortunately this does not link to the website favourites so you tend to get fragmented saves!

The location based services are pretty good, it means you can find properties close to your current location without having to manually enter a post code or search criteria.

All in all not too bad set of apps but it does seem to crash a number of time of both devices and obviously needs some improvement. A to app, needs more functionality to make the app really useful in real life.

[mr_e]

I'll be keeping a closer eye on this thread now, although some of the more on-the-go apps aren't going to be as useful for the iPod Touch!

Had a quick look through the App store today and there's an almost overwhelming amount of choice. I'm hoping I just had a mental lapse and failed to find the "sort by..." function though (got about 50 results for guitar tuning apps).

[Mike]

There are almost too many apps to be useful. There needs to be a better promotion / search function on the devices or through iTunes. It is marginally easier to find things in iTunes than through the devices which seems weirdly wrong!

The best way to find good apps seems to be through websites devoted to reviewing them. Macworld is a good start, although there are others out there too. Google should help you find them without any problem.

[mr_e]

Cheers Mike, will check them out and see what gems I find. Was slightly surprised to see that apparently the Touch is a popular gaming platform as well, don't think I'll be putting any on though (unless I have a particularly long train journey coming up).

[mr_e]

Stockfish

Not the most obviously named program, but it's a chess engine! It's free, with plenty of options to control the AI strength, including play style and opening book variety (and you can, thankfully, take back moves). Even on the medium settings the AI is comfortably beating me. Some people might not like the basic graphics, but they are very clear as a result and you can select different styles of pieces and colours.



iHandy Level

It's a spirit level. It's free and easy to use for those of us who don't trust aligning things by eye. Job done.