Flava Review: The app is a combination of scrapbook, journal, and calendar all in one. It gives you a place for everything and keeps everything in one place.
Consider this app an Internet-connected, multimedia diary and you’ve got the general idea. You can write notes, take pictures, mark locations, tag books and music, and link to websites all within Flava. It sorts your entries with a timestamp and organizes them on a calendar.
The interaction with the app is intuitive. You have a set of icons to choose from when you wish to enter new information: Text Only, Camera, Album, Places, Music, Books, and URL. Select one of those and you go to an entry screen specifically designed for the type of information you wish to enter.
Flava ties into both the Photo and iTunes apps on the iPhone for pictures and music. That means you can either take photos with the camera or select an existing one from your photo gallery. You can have some fun with photos too by adding stickers and captions to them. Music is selected from your iTunes library and you can add comments here too. There’s also a button to link to YouTube from the Music screen. This does a search on YouTube and finds videos related to that song. And it plays them without leaving the Flava app.
Flava is a great concept that could be used in a lot of contexts. While it’s a bit skewed toward the cutesy, it would prove useful to travelers, students, and professionals, for example. However, it has a few shortcomings currently that hold it back a bit. It desperately needs a search function. Capturing this information is only half the picture, finding it again is the other, missing, half. In addition, it could really use a movie link similar to the books tie in. And the fact that the Places feature was essentially non-functional at the moment also needs to be addressed. There was a Next button on the maps screen that didn’t appear to be working.
With a few bug fixes, Flava would be a great app. With some additional features it could be awesome. It’s your choice to spend the $0.99 now and hope for the upgrades or hold off for the time being and wait until it’s a little more well-developed.
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It’s that time of year again. That’s right folks, it’s fashion week! No, I didn’t know either. Fortunately though, someone at Apple is far more on the ball than me and has seen fit to launch their latest App Store category – ‘On the Catwalk: Apps to survive fashion week’.
Comprising over 30 iPhone and iPad apps, On the Catwalk is broken down into 4 sub-categories – ‘On the Catwalk’, ‘Fashion Press’, ‘Front row must-haves’ and ‘Buy the Look’. Plenty to keep you entertained while watching Project Runway! Apps currently featured include Ralph Lauren Collection, Lulu Guinness, Glamour Magazine and ShopStyle.
If clothes and all things shoe-like are your passion, be sure to check out the new On The Catwalk category, live in the App Store now.
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One of the things discussed when the iPad was launched was it’s impact on the print media. Would the iPad save it by enabling magazines and newspapers to utilize the new features to earn more revenue to stabilize the falling revenues of the print media or would it be the death nail in the print media’s coffin as millions of users changed their reading habits to the electronic form? The outcome to that debate has a long way to go but what the iPad is enabling is for new alternatives to the print media to grow and in this case it’s a new magazine app called Sideways.
Sideways is a lifestyle magazine with topics covered in it’s first issue including the World Cup, music, apps, food, technology and opinion. The app looks really nice and includes inbuilt music and video as well as the glossy pictures and clear text.
Sideways can be read in both landscape and portrait mode although the landscape view works best enabling a navigation bar on the left while the main content appears on the right. Navigating the app is easy too with the touch screen being utilized to scroll through the articles and that you have selected. Some of the screens do open up in ‘pop-up’ windows which you can then close down to return to the app.
Some of the nicest content in this first edition of the application were the music reviews which were video based and ran smooth and clear even at full screen.
With any magazine though, however good it looks, it will be based on it’s content and it’s writing and while some of the writing is engaging the articles are relatively short compared to the established magazines of the print world.
At $4 per issue I would hope to see an increase in the content per magazine especially as some content is not available with the launch of each issue but will become available days, if not weeks after the initial launch. It’s also worth noting that an internet connection is required for some of the content so those of you with WiFi only iPads will need to ensure that you have it connected to a WiFi hotspot to enjoy all of the content.
For its initial launch Sideways has produced a well rounded magazine app, if it can increase it’s content to offer even more value for money then they could have a winner on it’s hands.
Pros
Cons
Sideways – The Magazine, June 2010
Price: $3.99 (iTunes Store)
Category: Lifestyle
Released: Jun 09, 2010
Reviewed Version: 1.0
Size: 2.7 MB
Language: English
Seller: Sideways Software LLC
© 2010 Sideways
Not enough time to keep a diary? Tell it to your iPhone!
With Momento in your pocket you can write your diary on the go, capturing moments throughout the day in the short spaces of time you find free. Tag memorable events, people you meet and places you visit for a fast and effective way to browse and search your moments. You can also create custom tags to categorise and keyword moments however you wish.
Billing itself as a diary for busy people is Momento, which lets you build up full diary entries as the days go on by adding what happens when you have time. These moments as the app calls them can be your own text input, pictures from the iPhone camera or picture library, or from social site feeds. Presently the major sites are covered so you have your tweets, your Facebook status updates, pictures from flickr and your liked songs from Last.fm but I would like to see more services available in the future.
Moments can also be tagged for event, person, cleverly linking to address book contacts and location, giving you a choice of manual input or gps should you have an iPhone. There is also support for custom tags which can indeed be anything and should you go to use the same tag again it will appear in a list below helping you keep on track of them.
Graphics are a perfect blend of clean, easy to read iPhone interface and real textures, with wooden backgrounds and paper pages adding that extra shine to make it stand out amongst the standard interface crowd. The screen is divided into 4 tabs, List View showing a date ordered list of everything that has been entered, Month View which is your traditional month to view calendar. The Tags tab offers a list of all available tags that have been added to your moments and Feeds breaks down your social feeds into their source, rounding off the package are search filters boxes at the top of most lists making absolutely sure everything can be easily found.
While not a lot makes up the settings menu, accessed by tapping the cog in the top left corner, the main highlight is the xml export via email which would be handy if you were publishing your moments online. Bare in mind though pictures aren’t included in this file and this is no backup file either as there isn’t any way to import data at present. Other settings here are passcode settings, social feed settings and what time you want your day to end.
I find the lack of landscape keyboard support criminal, it’ll take 2 seconds to switch to this mode but the increase in typing speed makes it worth implementing many times over regardless of how little time you have to type. You are also limited to one feed per social network, while perfectly ok for normal people, some advanced users might be disappointed.
The lack of a landscape keyboard spoils it somewhat but this is still a great application for unloading your real and online life upon.
The Good:
The Not So Good:
Reviewed by: Matthew Green
Price: $2.99 (iTunes Store) as of 19/01/09
Reviewed Version: 1.0.2
Size: 2.1 MB
Seller: Michael Waterfall
Give yourself a handy launch pad with SyPhone!
My initial reaction to this application was “omg someone’s tried to clone Windows Mobile home screen for iPhone” but thankfully syPhone feels a lot better to use despite crashing out a few times. At the top of the screen you have 4 tabs, Email which lets you write a quick email within the application and ToDo which is a simple to do list, both support landscape keyboard however the latter not so well with the text entry box not filling the available screen space.
The next tab is RSS which is a simple RSS reader however it only lets you read what is in the feed itself, there is no pass through to Safari for reading the whole article if the publisher only decides to put a snippet in the RSS feed. The last tab is Find which brings up a list of all the names and phone numbers in your address book and lets you filter it down by name or number by simply using the keyboard or switching to the keypad towards the bottom of the screen are a series of quick call buttons which you can assign to individual numbers from your address book, the button is then replaced by the picture in the contact page, there are 12 of these available with 4 being visible at any one time and you drag left to right to scroll through them.
Other functions include, the current date, current time (mine for some reason is stuck at midday) with location and the current weather conditions with temperature. Tapping these items brings up further functionality, so tapping the date will bring up a month to view calendar and tapping either the time or weather will bring up 4 configurable locations thankfully the background pattern and colour is customisable by turning the device into landscape mode and tapping the a colour and then the pattern of your choice out of a selection of 10 colours and 4 patterns easily matching any iPhone case you care to adorn it with however accessing this function does clash a bit after say writing emails or notes in landscape mode.
As this application launches pretty fast it could be used quite a bit despite not being able to integrate fully into the iPhone software, as you could simply sleep the device while in the app and return to it quickly when going into your phone again.
My gripes with this application is that it feels cramped, partly due to the fact that most of the interactive elements are crammed into the top half of the screen with the static bottom half rarely leaving the screen. I also find this application a good bit unstable having it crashed on me at least 3 times during testing, and for some reason the clock in the middle reports my location but time stuck at midday. Initially I was at a loss as how you remove or edit items like quick call icons, weather and world clock entries all appeared permanent with no obvious way of removing them but actually if you swipe upwards over an item it will come up with a question “are you sure you want to remove this?”
syPhone 09 for iPhone is definitely worth checking out!
Price: $2.99
(as of 11/09/09 ver 1.5)
The Good
The Not So Good
Reviewed by: TylerDurdan
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App Description
Don’t fight your drunk dialing habit, embrace it!
Unlike other mobile phone apps that work to prevent drunk dialing, Ringr Roulette actually encourages it. Let Rignr Roulette take the guesswork out of who to call. With a simple shake of your iPhone, Ringr Roulette will go through your contacts and choose someone for you to babble to late at night or early in the morning. Ringr Roulette also allows you to create an “excluded” list while you are clear-headed. This helps avoid those hard to explain calls to your mom or your boss at 2 in the morning. Ringr Roulette also has easy to understand sound effects in case you aren’t seeing your screen too clearly.
Rignr Roulette is simple to use:
1. Get really crazy
2. Shake your iPhone
3. Wait for the “chicken out” timer (user settable in case you NEVER want to chicken out)
4. Wait for phone to ring
5. Babble incoherently about how much you hate and/or love the person you are talking to.Never drunk dial without Ringr Roulette again.
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Review
Next Read is a virtual book shelf on your iPhone/iPod touch which not only keeps a track of books you like but also keeps a track of books suggested to you by other sources!
FEATURES AT A GLANCE
• Fast Amazon based search lets you quickly search for books.
• Weighted scoring system lets you rank books by the value of suggestions.
• Recommendation sources are completely customizable, allowing you to tailor your own scoring system.
• Share lists with other Next Read users over WiFi or anyone else by sending them a list via email.
• Shake Search makes it easier to find books you might be interested in.
• Quick Add allows you to enter a book quickly right when you hear about it. The details can be refreshed later.
• Take notes on each book in your list.
• Browse Listmania lists that contain books in your lists.
• Clean, simple layout lets you get the facts fast.
Next Read certainly compliments an avid reader’s Lifestyle by offering great ways to never loose a track of any book you wanted to read. Next Read offers a very intuitive interface to add books to your wish list by either searching through Amazon (allows you to buy books too) or adding them manually with Quick Add option (requires Title and Author or ISBN Number) and take notes.
Next Read adds an interesting feature to assign score to source (Family, friend or Book Store) of the books, this scoring system is completely customizable. The scoring feature could prove to be helpful in prioritizing your next book. When you tap on a book you could either raise the score or reduce the score to zero to delete it. Once you have a list you can easily share it with friends over Wi-fi. The books can be sorted according to its score, source, author, or genre.
If you find yourself writing book titles at random places and wished being more organized Next Read is your answer!
If you would like to get Next Read leave a comment below telling us why you like it. It’s that simple!
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