So I just wanted to share some of the apps I’ve been playing with and how they’ve treated me.
Marvel App
In execution, I love the Marvel Comic Book app. The transitions, quality, comic browser all great. My problem is that, literally, all of the comics I care to spend my money on digitally (entire other conversation) are Dark Horse. Ok yeah that’s not a mark against the app, but against Marvel, but I still think it’s relevant.
Secondly, I found a comic I was interested in: Wolverine: Origin. The trouble however was twofold. First of all if you’ve read a trade vs the entire series bundled, you know that it’s much more enjoyable to just buy and handle the one piece of merchandise. However with the app you have to buy each trade separately. So for wolverine, to prepare myself to read the entire thing, I had to purchase all 6 trades, 1.99 each. That brings me to my last gripe: price. Why in the world am I being charged the same amount of money as if I buy off amazon? Yeah, $12 digitally or $11.50 off amazon free shipping. That right there prevented me from bothering. If it’s cheaper in non digital form I’m going to buy non digital.
Get the Marvel Comics app in iTunes
Headline
This is a really beautiful and well executed Google Reader app. It let’s you sync so you can read your blogs offline. I’ve only got two issues with it. First of all you can filter by unread. This wouldn’t be an issue if it ordered by date of publication but Google doesn’t always update every feed all the time so often there will be 5 or so posts buried somewhere in the mass of posts I’ve already cycled through. And secondly the only share option is email. You at least need share to google friends, let alone Twitter and Facebook. If those two issues were fixed this app would be a must buy, as of right now it’s just nice.
Get the Headline app in iTunes
Netflix
This app is still crashing on me but I’m going to temporarily write that off as growing pains. Really my only issue with the netflix app is that the movie browsing interface is seemingly just an implanted safari window. This produces a few annoying issues. Namely it’s slow. Now I haven’t tested netflix.com in true safari, but in the app the experience feels unnaturally slow. You also can’t do things like star movies. It just feels clunky. But to be honest, I have streaming video from a large library of movies and television, why should I be complaining… right?
ABC App
I wanted to drop as quick one on the ABC App. Really my only issue is that they limit you to the 5 most recent shows (I guess it’s this way on the website as well?). Really ABC? This makes the app completely useless to me. I was going to use this to explore new shows to watch, but if I’m mid season and I have to watch some random episode, I’m out. They’ve even got commercials! It really just feels like a baseless executive decision, which really turns me off to this app.
Get the ABC Player app in iTunes
WordPress App
I’m really enjoying this app. I’ve used it to actually write all of my iPad blogposts (although to finish this post i had to use a pc). Only issues are lack of any kind of formatting options (bold, italic, headline) and the inability to resize photos. Now you can write HTML in here for formatting, but the keyboard layout makes it highly frustrating. Other than that I also use it to moderate and reply to comments. You can save local drafts, publish them, and even setup pretty much every wordpress blog you have access to. Oh and there is an annoying bug that 90% of the time the cut/copy/paste dialog doesn’t show up. I’ve found some tricks to force it to show up, but they’re not reliable, and i shouldn’t be relied on to hack the planet to use an app.
Get the WordPress app in iTunes
That’s it. I’m hoping to go over more obscure apps, or some games, next time. The iPad app store still feels really bare. I’m not sure if it’s just too early or if some app makers are waiting for OS 4, but the selection really feels lacking right now.