Quick Takes on Five Apps

Welcome to the first installment of quick takes where I look at five apps that I have been playing with, sharing quick raw thoughts on them.

NBA Jam (iPhone)

This is a classic game that I spent many hours as a kid playing — now it’s out for the iPhone. I was worried about how well this would stack up to the original, but after playing it for a few days I can say it doesn’t disappoint. The gameplay and overall fun factor is very high. It fits perfectly on the iPhone as another one of those games you can pick up and put down very quickly without having to spend time getting back into the game. Great stuff and highly recommended.

Pennant (iPad)

Baseball season is about to start up and I couldn’t be happier. Pennant is a neat little iPad app that tells you all sorts of stats from the 1950s to 2010 on a team by team basis. You can even watch a beautiful “replay” of the games. This app is for baseball geeks, information geeks and app design geeks. The animation is a bit rough on my iPad, but I don’t know if that is due to my running iOS beta versions or not. My only question: do we get stat updates as the season progresses? That would be amazing.

Dayboard (iPad)

A cross between Nightstand HD’s flip style clock (personal favorite) and an old school airport flight status board. Dayboard gives you the current time, date, weather and Twitter trending topics. It is an interesting app that I think presents the data beautifully, but I can’t see the value of it long term. The app doesn’t respect my 24-hour time format and only works in portrait orientation. I like the idea, but I need some more options. For example: does the date really need to take up the same amount of space as the weather and Twitter feeds? I think not.

Pouch (iOS universal)

Pouch is a great little Backpack (37signals) app that the developer was kind enough to send me a promo code for. My main complaints about the app are actually complaints about what 3rd party developers are allowed to access through the Backpack API. For starters you can’t see comments, because that is not available. You also can’t see files which may limit the value of the app to many. Whether this app is of value to you depends on how you use Backpack — if it is a reference manager this may be quite handy. This app is nice looking and works really well, it really is the best Backpack app for iOS right now — having said that I still prefer to interface with the website directly.

Google Chrome 10 beta (Mac OS X)

I still hate everything about the way Chrome looks and that it has Flash bundled with it — but the version 10 beta is stupidly fast. In fact it is so fast that I may have to switch over to it for a while. There are a lot of extensions that I will need to find to make Chrome on equal footing the Safari, but those tradeoffs are worth it for the speed I am seeing out of Chrome. This is an impressive build.

Thanks for checking out the first installment of Quick Five, be sure to come back next week for another installment. If you have any apps you would like to see me write about be sure to get in touch.