iPhone App Reviews

iGouge

Chrisa | Jan 21, 2009 Entertainment

User rating: (3 votes, average: 3.33 out of 5)

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So, the hubby was concerned when he came home yesterday and found me sitting in the living room, in the dark, laughing menacingly, while someone screamed, “Ow!  That’s  my eye!”  When he flipped on the lights, and saw that all I was doing was playing with iGouge, a fun new applicaiton from Digital Motion, he sighed, flipped the lights back off, and walked away, shaking his head.

iGouge is just one of those silly iPhone apps that seem to have no point but is addictive as all getout.  Think of it as virtual revenge – stick your thumb in the eye of some wanker who’s making your life a living hell, hear him (or her) scream, watch his (or her) eye bloody, and giggle your ass off.  And, at just $0.99, it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than Xanax.

There’s really nothing to it – select the sex (male or female) of your victim, their eye color, and name the eye, so you know who’re your torturing.  Then gouge away.  The more you poke the eye, the bloodier it gets, and the more they yell in pain.  Good clean fun!  Gouge your boss, your ex, or a recently retired political figure, it’s all up to you.   The only thing I’d change would be the ability to reset the eye, to re-gouge my victim again, without having to exit the application and start over.  But besides this one thing, iGouge is the perfect toy for me to take out my pent up aggressions on some dillhole who really deserves it without the pesky police intervention of the real thing.

Tags: $0.99, Entertainment

Pencil Pusher

cskimbrell | Jan 20, 2009 Entertainment

User rating: (3 votes, average: 3.67 out of 5)

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Part of my “process” writing these reviews is that I do not do any sort of inquiry about the app that I choose to review. I avoid all other reviews so that the opinion I give is my own and I try to be as fair as possible. I chose an app called Pencil Pusher by SpinVisions solely based on the fact that the name caught my eye and sadly to say…. I ended up disappointed.

Don’t get me wrong, Pencil Pusher has a decent idea behind it. It is a drawing app, but from what I could gather it is trying to be a more “precise” drawing app. In most iphone drawing apps, you draw with your finger, but in this app you control a pencil that does the drawing. The problem is that the app seems unfinished, with a complete lack of direction and instruction as to how to use it. To make matters worse, the controls feel awkward and take some a lot of getting used to. I literally spent the first 10 minutes of my time with this app wondering why my pencil wasn’t producing any lines at all. Finally, I felt like man discovering fire as I drew my first line, then proceeded to wonder how in the heck I had actually done it.

There are some good things about this app that show it has some potential. There is a large supply of palettes to choose colors from, it has the ability to import pictures from your iphoto library and save your drawings as well, there is a large selection of paper (backgrounds) to draw on, and the overall layout is very simple and clean. The options are there, but sadly after that, the app goes sour. 

There are no instructions of any kind anywhere within the app to tell you how to operate it. What I figured out, I figured out through trial and error. After a while I discovered that drawing requires two fingers placed on the iphone screen spaced pretty far apart (Closer together allows you to rotate the pencil.. kind of.. It doesn’t always seem to work… I may be doing it wrong?) Really, the controls just seem very awkward to me and at times proved to be quite frustrating. I found myself accidently drawing lines multiple times, and the app just wasn’t giving me the freedom to draw like I wanted. I’ve used other drawing apps, and this one just left me frustrated and with a headache.

Maybe with some updates, some instructions, some tighter controls, and maybe some additions to the pencil (Calligraphy pens? Paintbrush? a sponge?) this app could get a better review, but in its current state, I cannot say that I would recommend it to anyone.

Tags: Art, cskimbrell, drawing, Entertainment

Flower Club

Chrisa | Jan 19, 2009 Entertainment

User rating: (2 votes, average: 3.00 out of 5)

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For my first iPhone App Review, I decided I’d try something girlie, since I think women are underrepresented in techie-type review blogs like this one.  Anyway, as a broad myself, I was intrigued by the idea of, as the developer put it, finding the florist within, so I gave Flower Club from Orchard Party a go.  And I found out something about myself – I don’t HAVE an inner florist.  Or, if I do, this app frustrated the crap out of her.

Flower Club does let the user arrange three different types of flowers in one of several vase options, along with greenery and other flotsam and jetsam.  But the flower choices are very limited – red rose, purple tulip, or yellow daisy.  And don’t try and create yourself a dozen red roses – only five flowers per vase allowed, no matter the vase you choose.  That frustrated me the most.  I mean, come on, women want a dozen roses, people, not one in a bud vase!  Getting one rose in a bud vase either means you’re in high school, or the dude who gave it to you lives with his mother.

Once you create an arrangement, you can save it to the gallery.   Then the next bit of frustration kicks in.  When you view your gallery, your arrangements are all there, beautiful and blooming.  Select one and - low and behold – it’s closed buds, waiting to bloom.   If you want to see your arrangement blooming again, you have to “water” it, by clicking the water icon over and over and over and over and over and…you get the picture.  And if you have more than one flower in your arrangement, you have to water each one individually.  They don’t all bloom together.  Finally, if you water them enough (it took me 38 “clicks” to get a three flower arrangement to bloom)to get them to bloom, when you leave the gallery, they bud up.  You have to water them all over again to see them in bloom the next time you visit the gallery. 

Even at $0.99, Flower Club was too pricey a club for me.  If I could have saved images of my arrangements to my iPhone photo gallery so I could email them, I might have liked this app more.  But sticking a rose in a bud vase and incurring carpal tunnel syndrome to get it to bloom just didn’t do it for me.

Tags: $0.99, Entertainment