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.
Pros:
- Simple timeline concept
- Great integration with books database, social networks
- Excellent variety of information types that can be stored
Cons:
- Needs an iPad optimized version
- Some bugs in the calendar and places functions
- Needs a global search function
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