iPhone App Reviews

Jamd

Michael (Admin) | Aug 27, 2008 News

User rating:

(3 votes, average: 4.33 out of 5)

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I have the attention span of a five-year-old and I’m not ashamed to admit it. When I “read” the newspaper I’m not reading the articles… I’m reading the captions under all the nice pictures. This is why I like Jamd – it’s all about photos and the accompanying story capsules that are occasionally weird and are written by people called ‘shindig’ and ‘kitten’. Jamd certainly has a few flaws, but it’s still a pretty cool way to get a quick glimpse of what’s happening out there in the world.

Jamd is divided into three categories: Featured, Breaking, and Popular. Search is also available if the three default categories don’t do anything for you. Tap a story to read more, and the full text of each story comes with a thumbnail photo. Tap the thumbnail and that’s where Jamd starts to work its magic.

Behind each story’s thumbnail photo is usually a whole slew of related photos from the story you were just looking at. Some stories might not have any related photos at all, but if you’re reading about Brad Pitt or the Olympics or something that gets a lot of coverage then the extra photos will be there. Duplicates seem to come with the territory, but they’re easily pushed out of the way with a swipe of the finger.

When looking at a group of photos, or a “stack” as it’s called in Jamd, one finger will move photos around and two fingers will let you resize and rotate the photos. The motion is very fluid and kind of fun to do when there’s a lot to dig through. Double-tap any photo to see the story behind it. Unfortunately Jamd doesn’t let you save the photos directly from the app… Getty Images obviously doesn’t want to encourage that behavior… but you can either take a screenshot or email the story’s web link to yourself and save it from the Jamd website.

Jamd is a great idea that could only be pulled off by a company that owns 70 million photos the way Getty Images does. There’s no question that it’s nicely executed, but the app isn’t perfect… as of right now, none of Jamd’s three categories contains more than 15 stories which is very limiting. I’m also pretty unclear on how stories are classified as Featured, Breaking, or Popular. Check out the screenshots to see what I’m talking about… “Daddy can you buy me a pony” is breaking news? Pffft.

Tons more highlighted content and more logical category placement would make this app Great, but until that happens I’m just going to classify it as Really Good.