AccuFuel - track your MPG

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App: AccuFuel
Released: 31st July 2008
Developer: Appigo, Inc
Price: £0.59
Rating:

AccuFuel is neat little app from Appigo for keeping track of your fuel economy. It's a simple concept with a big, bold UI and simple controls. Appigo look like they're going after a reputation for building apps that solve small problems and do it well, with this app and another app called Todo.

When you open up the app, you see a screen mostly taken up by an image of a fuel pump and details of your average mpg and the mpg from your last tank. You also see a graph of your mpg over the life of using the app.



Now, each time you fill up you bring up the app and fill in all the details; the price, the amount of fuel, and the reading from your odometer (via a nicely thought out set of rollers like an old-school bike lock). Of course doing this at the pump flies in the face of all the warnings plastered around the pumps telling you to switch off your mobile any time you're near the fuel, but I'm pretty sure everyone ignores those signs anyway :)

The app also lets you tell it about your car, and looks up your manufacturers stated figures for comparison. The developers have also thought about the market outside the US, allowing you to set the units of both the fuel and the economy figures. They've also included support for more than one car, and you can even pull your data out of the app by emailing it as a CSV document.



Summary: this was never going to be a killer iPhone app, but it's a nicely thought-out and well-executed little app that does it's job and does it well. If you've got a decent trip computer in your car, maybe you won't use this. But if, like me, your car is missing a few of those creature comforts (like back seats and a boot too in my case :) ) then this might find a place on your iPhone, and for 59p you can't really lose!

Showtimes Vs Movies

View in iTunes App: Showtimes Released: 7th July 2008 Developer: Avantar LLC Price: Free Rating:

View in iTunes App: Movies Released: August 25th 2008 Developer: Flixster Price: Free Rating:

A first for our blog! a fist fight between the two best free movie apps for the iPhone. In the red corner we have Showtimes from Avantar (aka YellowPages) and in the blue corner Movies aquired by the film website Flixster. Both provide very similar functions, but there isn't room for both on one iPhone, so lets get started, ding ding round 1. Features included with both apps: A List of the closest cinemas based on GPS location or configured post code Ordering cinemas by favourite Link to google maps displaying cinema location Selecting the date up to 7 days in advance Film title Film length Film rating Show times Additional information from imdb/flixster Although you'd think this is all the information you'd ever want the Movies app thinks otherwise. It adds the following features above and beyond those provided by Showtimes. Release date Director Future films Links to flixster, rotton tomatoes and imdb Trailers DVD releases Access to trailers is quick but the they are low quality. The addition of DVD releases is nice and it may prompt me to update my LoveFilm list but it's not revolutionary. Although there are no problems with the extra features provided by Movies I don't think they will get a lot of use, saying that round 1 goes to Movies. Onto round 2, which contender is the easiest to use. The purpose of these apps is for the user to access information on current films, at cinemas near them. Showtimes does this on the front screen by displaying a list of cinemas in your vicinity and the films they are showing. The nearest cinema is displayed at the top, others require a scroll and tap to bring up the film info. The information displayed includes film times, length, certificate and rating. For me this is all the information I'd require to go and book some tickets and I didn't even press a button, or touch the screen in this case. However if you do tap the film of choice you are given a short description of the film pulled from imdb. If you want to change the date you are interested in then simply tap the right or left arrows at the top of the screen to see up to a week in advance. The Movies front page displays a list of cinemas and their addresses in order of vicinity. Tapping on the cinema of choice opens a new screen which, after a short delay, contains the phone number of the cinema and a list of films, with show times. To check the certificate and film length you need to tap again to bring up another screen, which also reveals a short description, a link to a trailer and some movie websites. To select a different day you need to go into the separate settings menu. Once the date is changed you need to go back to the front screen to reselect the cinema, otherwise the setting doesn't take effect. This quickly becomes tiresome when checking film times over several days. This round definitely goes to Showtime! Round 3 and both contenders come out fighting. It's one round each but which one will take the belt? I have already talked about the main features and the usability of both apps but only one has a place on my iPhone. So lets discuss what's left. Showtime has the ability to order the list of films by popularity, rating and newest and when using this mode tapping on a film reveals all the cinemas, showing this film and the times. This is particularly useful if like me you have a choice of 4 cinemas in close proximity, comparing the times of all them on one page makes choosing the right showing a doddle. In Movies favour it does link directly to Flixster, so if you have an account you can click on a film and it will take you to the relevant web page where you can review the film and give it a rating out of 5 stars. I imagine that if you are a regular member then Movies provides that extra integration and is probably the app for you. So that just leaves one thing.....the winner. Both are good apps but for my own personal use I have to give it to Showtime for it's simplicity. Summary: If you want an app to help you decide which cinema, which film and what time, then Showtime is slick and easy to use. If you want to dive in further and watch trailers and write reviews then maybe Movies is your app.

JiveLite - Zookeeper anyone?

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App: JiveLite
Released: 22nd August 2008
Developer: Jirbo
Price: Free

Rating:

For those of you that know the game ZooKeeper you'll be familiar with JiveLite. The game involves switching animals in a grid to make a row or column of 3 or more, doing this removes those animals from the grid making room for more to drop in from above. The game has 2 modes, timed, where you need to keep the life bar topped up and untimed which lets you play at your own leisurely pace. Both of these modes require you to earn as many points as you can, points are awarded at 10 points for each animal and increases by 10 points for each level you reach. If you are struggling to find the next move there is a hint button which shows you which animal you need to move, but this does lose you 200 points. High scores can be uploaded to the Jirbo server where you will be compared to the best of the best, the top score is outragous seeing as I spent about an hour getting 49220.

The graphics are clear and cute but the sound lets it down. The only sound effect seems to be a ripping noise whenever you clear a row or column of animals. The controls work well on the touch screen although switching the animals doesn't seem as responsive as it should be.

Jirbo have made a number of games for the iPhone, with a total of 15 apps, most contain the cutesy animals. The website http:/www.jirbo.com allows you to create your own avatar which can be used in all the Jirbo games and is displayed on the online scoreboards.

Overall this is a game you could lose a fair amount of time to, it's simple and addictive. However after getting lucky and hitting a huge high score the lack of modes and online multiplayer will find you moving onto the next Jirbo game.

Summary: It's ZooKeeper but not as responsive or feature packed as the Nintendo DS version.

iFooty 1.0.1 Update

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Its only been a matter of a week since iFooty was first released, but I'm very pleased to report that it has received a small, but welcome update. So far, I have spotted just two main changes in this update, but I am very pleased to see both.

The first is the addition of team statistics to the tables:



This was definitely a noticeable omission from the original release, so its nice to see it added so quickly.

The second update fixes a fairly major bug whereby with the original version if you were looking at a teams results, and then pressed "Table" to return to the list of teams, the application would crash. Personally, I hadn't even noticed this failure until it was pointed out to me. I guess I luckily hadn't spent any time looking at different teams results. However, the bug had stopped that person using the app completely. Clearly another good improvement then.

You can check out the full iFooty review here.

Summary: I loved this app when it was new, and this small updated has only improved it. The developer is very keen to continue improving iFooty, so I'm looking forward to the next update.

GroceryZen - shopping lists on your iPhone

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App: GroceryZen
Released: 23rd August 2008
Developer: gbcb Software, Inc
Price: £2.99
Rating:


GroceryZen aims to be the solution to all your food shopping needs. It lets you build shopping lists by item and by recipe, sorts the items on the list by aisle, and lets you mark them as purchased.

Ever since my first smartphone (an HTC Wizard which is still going strong as my TomTom device while Apple gets its GPS act together) I've been looking for a simple, easy-to-use and feature-complete shopping list application. I had something for a while on the Wizard which let me do roughly what I wanted; select meals I wanted for the week ahead and ahve the ingredients collated and ordered relative to their location in the shop. This was a little bit hacky and the ordering was largely down to some manual crafty metadata tagging, but it worked and I found it useful (even if I did look a bit of a prat walking round Sainsburys with my mobile in my hand). Now GroceryZen brings that functionality to the iPhone, albeit in a much slicker package.



The app lets you add individuals items (either from the pre-programmed list of hundreds or by entering your own manually) or entire recipes (again either from the example list of three or by manually entering your favourite recipes).

It is the recipe functionality that makes this more than just another list app. You can add a short description of the recipe, a picture, and also a URL to full recipe instructions. Add to this functionality some nice integration work; the app integrates with the camera to let you add a photo to a recipe either from the camera itself or your photo library, and provides the standard red numerical indicator on the home page to alert you that there are items outstanding on the list.



So this app does absolutely everything I wanted of my shopping app three years ago. Unfortunately, time moves on and in this collaborative, "Web-2.0" world my expectations have moved on as well. I want to be able to discover and download recipes to the app from recipe websites and blogs, and I want to share my recipes with the world. Ok, so these are nice-to-have features, and maybe it is a bit much to ask for £2.99. But what about collaboration in building the list? I want to be able to share my shopping list with my partner, so she can add items to it when they occur to her, and I want those items to sync to the phone. I have this with my current iPhone shopping solution using ZenBe (review coming soon) and iGoogle, and if I switched now to a slotuion that doesn't have that ability, I would find myself in the dog house :)

Summary: A good effort, and the best food-shopping-specific list program I've seen so far. But to make it a killer app, it needs to take advantage of the net connection and introduce collaborative features to allow editting of the list on multiple computers.

DataCase - use your iPhone as a portable drive

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App: DataCase
Released: 11th August 2008
Developer: Veiosoft
Price: £3.99
Rating:

DataCase is one of a number of apps designed to bring file system capabilities to the iPhone. iPod users have for some time been used to using the storage space on their device for files other than music, and Veiosoft have stepped up to bring this capability to the best iPod of them all.




















From the screenshots, it's clear to see that a lot of time and effort has gone in to making the app feel polished and unique; this wasn't put together overnight. Security is handled in a way many mobile users will be familiar with from using bluetooth; the app pops up an Allow/Deny dialog when something, somewhere tries to read a file or folder on the phone. This means no need for logging in iwth a user ID and password, but it's a shame that I can't simply leave DataCase running in my pocket and get full access on my computer without the need for going back to the app to allow ocnnections. Fortunately it does remember your authorizations, and won't pester you about allowing access to the same directory structure after the initial access. There is also the option of allowing authorization-free access to selected areas of your storage if you don't care who or what can see what you've stashed away in there.

Connecting to the iPhone can be achieved with AFP, FTP and HTTP protocols. What does that mean? Well, it depends what your favourite operating system is...

Mac OS X
If you have a Mac, this is the file store app you've been looking for. AFP (Apple Filing Protocol), coupled with the Bonjour service discovery protocol, means all you need to do is run the DataCase app on your iPhone and it will automatically show up as a file system in the Finder sidebar on any Macs connected to the same local network. You can then use the file system in the same way as you would any other; you can read, edit, drag and drop, delete, and manage folders. Any changes you make are made directly to the iPhone. This is how mobile storage should be, and hats off to the developers for the effort involved; I hear they implemented the whole protocol stack in-house which is a hefty amount of work. Now if only the same level of integration and slickness could be found on...

Windows

On the downside, things aren't so easy on Windows. AFP is not supported directly by Windows, and I haven't found any third party software to add support (but if you know better then let me know via the comments!). This leaves Windows users with two options, HTTP and FTP. HTTP lets you view and copy files from the iPhone, but no modifications can be made. FTP goes one step further and lets you create, delete, and drag and drop files and folders. However the problem comes when you try to edit a file; the only way to achieve this is to copy the file to a local file system on your Windows machine, edit it, and then remember to copy it back afterwards to update the iPhone. It's a far cry from the slick Mac desktop integration. However, I was told by a Veiosoft developer that they are working on adding DAV protocol support in an update in the next month or two, and on the horizon is SMB support, which means fully-fledged network drive support for both Windows and Linux. This will be a great achievement if they manage it and could make DataCase unnassailable as the iPhone file store app of choice.

So is it worth £3.99? If you have a Mac, it's a no-brainer; zero-config, full file access and a good UI. Stuck with Windows? Then you have a choice between buying this now and making do with FTP access while waiting for SMB support to come, or taking a look at the competition (watch out for a review of Files coming soon). My advice? Veiosoft have produced a very professional application, carried out a public beta test to ensure quality, and their customer support is polite, responsive and detailed. They seem very committed to making DataCase a success and continuing to refine the program in the future. This is where I'd put my money.

Summary: Good app, destined to be great in the future with further protocol support. Best of breed file system access for the iPhone.