Welcome to this week’s roundup of Weird and Small Apps. For this twelfth column, we have thirteen fourteen different apps to show you today, starting with comic books to precede today’s release of the movie Star Trek, continuing with new restaurant and location apps, a few marginal mini-apps, and a couple of mini-games. Editor’s Note: We added app #14, a standalone Star Trek game, after initial publication of this roundup.
Our top picks are the impressive 3-D mapping, subway, and location finder UpNext 3D NYC, and the four Star Trek comics. The remaining apps are a real mix of decent to good picks with titles that really lacked in either the execution or concept departments. Read on for all the details.
While iVerse Media’s Star Trek Countdown ($1 each) series of digital comic books isn’t the first to be available in app form, nor is it even close to the first comic book series available for Apple’s pocket devices, it does raise an interesting set of questions: are $1 apps a smart way to distribute comics? Having been released as four separate comic books and an $18 paperback collection, Countdown’s four pieces collectively tell the story leading up to this week’s new Star Trek movie—basically, how an old Ambassador Spock and key crew from the Next Generation Enterprise were previously involved with Nero, the movie’s villain. Each app is comprised of multiple, well-drawn art panels that are cut from the comic books’ pages and notably cropped to provide readability, without offering a way to zoom in or out to see the whole of the original art; all you can do is flip in a linear fashion from panel to panel with your choice of three screen transition effects.
iVerse’s Star Trek comics differ markedly from the $2 Watchmen Motion Comics, which transformed the original 12 Watchmen comics into 25 or 30-minute videos with animated individual panels, a passive form of entertainment that used voiceovers and Flash-style movements to keep you watching. The advantage of the Countdown apps is that they’re easy to download to an iPhone or iPod touch and convey most of the comics’ content in an easy to read, user-paced format, but for those seeking the complete original panels, something visually enhanced like Watchmen, or comics that can also be viewed on a computer, these apps fall a little short of the ideal. For a buck each, though, they’re easier to buy than the comics, and harder to complain about. iLounge Rating: B+.
When we first downloaded Star Trek: The Mobile Game ($3) from Electronic Arts, we’d planned to give it a standalone review. As it turns out, however, this simple title definitely belongs in the Small Apps category: it’s a plain jane overhead shooter with just enough Star Trek content to avoid being dismissed as just another sloppy licensed game. You take command of the original Enterprise under the command of a young James Kirk, who along with his crew occasionally appears as an icon on screen with a line or two of text-only dialogue, overlapping levels that scroll ever-upwards as you’re attacked by enemy ships. Initial levels place you under Klingon fire, with Cardassian and Romulan stages thereafter, each possessing new ships and challenges.
While the Klingon stages are primarily focused on seeing the Enterprise destroy ships—a process aided by phasers that lock onto nearby targets and photon torpedos that shoot straight forwards—the Cardassian stages require more dodging of dangerous background objects, and the Romulan ones add floating proximity mines to the mix. In each case, you’re mostly just steering your ship around, blowing things up and collecting the health and weapon power-ups they drop; a system to upgrade your weapons, shields, and power-up-recovering tractor beam is the only thing that will keep you interested in performing well.
That’s because the game is sluggishly paced and repetitive. Most ships emerge in easily destroyed waves, unimpressive boss ships appear and then crumble under the might of your weapons, and from stage to stage, the levels look almost identical to one another. Animation is consistently mediocre, and the music is orchestral but dreary, repeating over and over underneath sound effects that do the same thing. Thus, while Star Trek: The Mobile Game’s core gameplay may be just what one might expect from an Enterprise-focused overhead shooter, there’s literally nothing exciting about this adventure—like too many App Store game releases, it’s hard to notice and easy to forget. iLounge Rating: B-.
The concept behind FoodMenus ($1) by Blue Sky Internet Ventures is fantastic: download an app, enter a local restaurant name, and get its menu details, address, and phone number instantly. As restaurant fans, and ones who often wonder about what’s available on a menu while we’re on the road, the idea of a central electronic database or reference point for local menus just makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately, FoodMenus isn’t it. The developers have created an application that displays restaurant and star rating information taken from another service, grafting onto it a menu search feature that appears to be pulling similarly named restaurants’ menu results from the Internet. Search for a local New York place called Duff’s or Mother’s, as we did, and you’ll get the menu from different places in different states; search for another place like Bocce’s, and you’ll be confronted with a list of 10 possible menu pages, with either 0 or 1 of them actually for the right restaurant. While the app may work for chain restaurants, it’s obviously using searching tricks that make it more than unreliable for local ones, and we wouldn’t pick it up in its current state. iLounge Rating: C-.
Similarly somewhat off but considerably more expensive is ViaMichelin’s series of 2009 Michelin Guides, which vary in price from $7 to $19 based on the names and numbers of included countries contained within the app. We tested New York City – The Michelin Guide Restaurants ($7) and immediately encountered a stunning problem: there’s no way to search by restaurant name. Instead, Michelin gives you the ability to search “near an address” or “near here,” the latter using the iPhone’s GPS or location services, and the results returned range from useless to only semi-useful: we couldn’t find some places we’d liked in New York City, and for others, there was little more than a breezy paragraph with little real advice.
So how does this qualify as a small app? It’s under a Megabyte in size, and actually depends on an Internet connection for its listings, forcing travelers to be within Wi-Fi range or find cellular connections in order to receive information. While Michelin is excited to break with tradition and let users comment on individual establishments for the first time in its history, the app would have been a lot more useful if it stuck to the company’s strengths: contain a full, searchable book that let us look up restaurants by name. As-is, this pricey paid guide is less useful than free ones such as Urbanspoon and Yelp. iLounge Rating: C-.
We were seriously intrigued by UpNext 3D NYC ($3) from UpNext, an app that claims to be an “interactive 3D map to explore Manhattan,” letting you “fly and zoom through the city fluidly, in its full 3D glory, without network hiccups or download times.” While the 3-D maps are somewhat generically assembled in the case of most buildings, major landmarks—except for the Fifth Avenue Apple Store—are represented, alongside clearly marked subway routes, recently opened and longtime businesses in categories such as Dining, Nightlife, Shopping, and Recreation, and in some cases photos of the venues.
The venue list is searchable either by typing or touching buildings, and the individual businesses are complete with phone numbers, addresses, and reviews taken from other web sites including Yelp, TimeOut, and CitySearch. While we’d love to have even more freedom to explore within UpNext’s 3-D models, this interface is the future of mobile mapping; NY denizens or tourists will find the current version useful, but we really hope it sparks an international drive to create more detailed, iPhone-ready maps for other cities, as well. Should Google Maps on the iPhone ever look like this, the world would be a much better and easier place to navigate. iLounge Rating: A-.
The last of the food apps today is TipOut ($3) by Paul Blackwell, an interesting release that suffers from a less than ideal interface. TipOut’s purpose is to allow either a restaurant manager or wait staff to apportion tips between multiple employees based on the number of hours they worked, and the percentages they’re entitled to receive for their given jobs. One screen lets you enter the percentages for different types of servers, another lets you identify all the servers who are working, and another gives you a calendaring system with the ability to note how many hours and which people worked on given days, dividing the cash and credit tips that were generated between them. A button also lets you export results to PocketMoney or other iReceipt-compatible formats. While the application generally does what it’s supposed to do, initial setup is more difficult than it needs to be, as TipOut drops you into its empty pages without any explanation, expects you to set up all of the employees as Contacts on your device, and then uses a somewhat limited categorization system to assign percentage allocations. Some users—and you know who you are—will find the app’s features substantially useful for their restaurants, while others may need a little more hand-holding through the setup process or greater versatility in assigning either tips or positions. A little added polish would make this a better app overall. iLounge Rating: B-.
Of the three marginally useful mini-apps we look at today, inTouch Address Book ($3) by Inversity is in the middle of the pack in questionable value. This app does nothing more than tell you whether contacts on your list are “available” or not to be contacted, making certain automatic judgments based on their area codes and then allowing you to fine tune them with more specific time zone, opening or availability hours you input yourself. The results are displayed as green, yellow, or red balls on a modified version of your contacts list, and frankly, the automatic guesstimates aren’t very impressive. While a feature like this could conceivably be useful as an optional element of the iPhone’s current contacts system, we wouldn’t pay for it, let alone $3. iLounge Rating: D+.
Moments ($1) by Luga is arguably the most useful of these apps, but not by much. It exists as a flippant alternative calendar of sorts, letting you post very brief notes attached to timers that count upwards or downwards from the current calendar date. You get the choice of three different themes—sadly, all with the awful Marker Felt font—and the app keeps track of whatever events you may find to be noteworthy, telling you how many days have passed or are forthcoming.
