iPhone App Reviews

Campaign

Michael (Admin) | Sep 19, 2008 News

User rating: (6 votes, average: 4.33 out of 5)

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10/27/08: Gorloch Interactive provided me with a Campaign update

First things first: if you’re an American adult and you’re not registered to vote, get on it! The deadline for voter registration varies by state, and a lot of states close registration in the first week of October. Here’s a list of state-by-state voter registration deadlines. You can also register to vote within Campaign via Rock the Vote.

That’s my good deed for the day. Now back to business.

Gorloch Interactive’s Campaign is a one-stop shop for all of the 2008 Election coverage you could possibly want. It’s really a pretty nice app if you just can’t get enough of this year’s presidential slugfest, and it’s especially useful if you’re looking for more than the limited political coverage provided by other iPhone news apps.

Campaign’s main attraction is the News section which aggregates campaign news from different sources depending on what you declare as your party affiliation when you first start up the app. Very clever! Nobody wants to read the other side’s blasphemous musings, so kudos to Gorloch Interactive for taking this into account.

I pushed the Democrat button and got news from left-leaning sources like The Huffington Post, MSNBC, The New York Times, and CNN.com to name a few. After switching to Republican in the iPhone Settings menu, I was shown more conservative reporting that seemed to come mostly from The Washington Times and National Review Online. Stories open within the app which is certainly better than switching to Safari, but I wish it would give me the option to open the stories in Safari if I want to.

Other features include a (weekly?) poll and info that’s specific to each of the major party candidates. Within the sections for Obama and McCain there’s equal access to their biographies and blog posts from each guy’s campaign website.

Everything in Campaign is great for the political junkie but I have one major problem with this app: it seems to get stuck on the “loading” page an awful lot. When this happens I just restart the app and that usually takes care of it, but chronic performance issues in any app get really annoying really fast.

Another improvement that I’d like to see is more than one poll at a time, or maybe even user-created polls.

So, is Campaign worth $.99? Overall it’s a good app that provides content not found in most other news applications, so if you’re a true political groupie then I’d say sure, a buck isn’t asking much and hopefully the performance issues will be addressed with an update in the very, very near future.

There does remain, however, the question of what will become of this app after the election is over six weeks from now? Maybe The Mighty Gorlochs (my secret pet name for the developer) can leave a comment below and shed some light on Campaign’s future for those who are wondering about the app’s longevity.

Tags: $.99, News