iPhone App Reviews

Posts Tagged ‘mature’

pour1out

Michael (Admin) | Aug 15, 2008 Entertainment

User rating:

(2 votes, average: 1.00 out of 5)

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Another entry from the Totally Useless file… pour1out! This poorly executed (and poorly disguised) ploy to sell 40 oz. “cozies” to dress up your bottle of St. Ides is pretty funny in a bad, stereotypically ghetto way.

Pour1out lures you in with the promise of being able to pour a virtual 40 oz. bottle by tilting your iPhone to and fro. This concept has been done several times by several different apps but the thing that sets this one apart is that it’s incredibly bad at pouring.

Tilt your iPhone and watch the bottle of foamy yellow liquid tip slightly, ‘relieve itself’ of a pitifully small amount of its contents, and then suddenly fly out of frame only to appear again for an encore. Wow! So not worth the download.

If the sight of a clear bottle that looks like it’s just been used as a urinal is distasteful to you (elitist!), tap the info button and you can cover it with a themed cozy that looks like a bandana, a designer knockoff pattern, or the always-classy tuxedo tshirt. And, if you super-love that cozy, of course there’s a link to 40cozy’s website where they’ll gladly help you pimp out a real-life bottle in exchange for a few dollars and all of your self-respect.

Your last, and best, option is to just tell the app to find you a place (via iPhone’s GPS map) to get some real booze so you can get hammered and try to forget about the three minutes of your life you just flushed down the toilet by installing pour1out.

: You had me at objectionable!

: The title screen alone tells you this is going downhill fast

: At least you gotta love the sound effect which was obviously recorded in a bathroom

: Quick, get some booze before you waste more precious drinking time on this app

: Eh, do you really want this thing to know how to find you?

Tags: free, funny, mature, useless

Secrets

Michael (Admin) | Aug 7, 2008 Social Networking

User rating:

(5 votes, average: 4.60 out of 5)

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There’s a really popular blog called PostSecret where anonymous people send in homemade postcards that reveal their darkest secrets for the world to see. The secrets can range from shocking to depressing to funny to lame… you get the idea.

PostSecret

Golgi has taken the same concept and adapted it for iPhone users to post their (sometimes) dirty laundry in a similarly anonymous environment. A lot of open forums like this tend to disintegrate into a cesspool of spammers and people trying to get laid, but the self-policed Secrets community and the Secrets staff seem to be doing a good job of maintaining some semblance of order and overall it’s pretty entertaining!

The “secrets” that I’ve seen so far have been a mixed bag of silliness, stupidity, sad revelations, genuine confessions of misdeeds, and a relatively small amount of spam here and there. All text is displayed in the kind of scripty font you find on Hallmark cards and some people can’t stand this but I think it works pretty well for confessing your sins. I’ve included more screenshots than usual with this review to give you an idea of the range of thoughts you’ll find in the Secrets community.

And that brings us to the subject of parental responsibility. This warning is my good deed for the day:

With Secrets I have yet to see any outright porn or sexual propositions (still hoping!), but there are definitely some bad words and “mature themes” involving sex and drugs. Personally I think sex and drugs are super, but if your 8 year old suddenly asks if you’re “addicted to masturbation” then maybe it’s time to uninstall or at least lock the iPhone with a passcode.

Speaking of masturbation, adding your own secret is easy… you can choose an existing photo, take a new one, or fill the background with color. After that you just type in your big confession and you’re all set. Be careful, though! Once you post it, there’s no turning back. After all, it’s anonymous so how would they know you were really the one who posted it?

When your secret gets posted, you’ll see the text in a semi-transparent box and if you tilt your iPhone back the box will disappear to reveal the artwork or color behind it. It’s a nice way to be able to share thoughts and the accompanying visual at the same time, but a lot of times the accelerometer behavior feels kind of unpredictable. Sometimes you have to tilt to see the art, sometimes you have to tilt to see the words.

Secrets does have some downsides and one is that it seems to crash more often than other apps. You’ll be tapping around, laughing at the misfortune of others, and suddenly the app just closes and you’re looking at icons. This happened to me a few times while trying to post my own secret which was frustrating. Another negative is that right now there’s a total of just 355 secrets. Obviously this will change if the app gains popularity, and that prospect is directly related to my final gripe that Secrets needs more (or maybe just better) ways to sort content. Search is available and there are three ways to browse secrets: highest rated, most viewed, and most recent. You’ll probably spend most of your time browsing, and paging through the same secrets every time you open the app or change views is not fun.

Still, I think Secrets is pretty cool and for only $.99 it makes for an interesting diversion when you have time to kill. It’s perfect for when you’re waiting in line or just sitting on the can so I say it’s worth buying. And after you’ve seen enough of other people’s secrets, chances are you’ll be tempted to post your own.

P.S. From the developer’s website:

Known bugs:
If you bookmark a secret that has no text, then relaunch the app, it will crash before opening.

Solution:
The only fix is to delete the app, then re-download “Secrets” from the App Store. You will not get charged again although you must click “Buy Now” if browsing from your iPhone / iPod Touch. Deleting the app will remove all your bookmarks, so if you accidently bookmark a secret with no text just go to your bookmarks section and delete before shutting down your app.