Dan Lipert

So I’m a little late, already on my second friday app reviews, but I’ll get on the ball, I swear. I am in Portland again, finally, and I’m so happy, but its been stressful looking for an apartment, as it always is. Anyway, last week I said I would get the paid version of instapaper and write a review so here it is: Also.. keep reading for a review of doodle jump (its annoyingly fun)

Instapaper has really been a godsend, and as I imagined last week, getting the pro version was really just a thin layer of icing on the cake. I feel good that I’ve helped out another independent developer who has made a great product. The added features are ho-hum, I haven’t really used them too much, and when I did try to read a wired article the app crashed. Blech… I sent in a bug report and haven’t heard anything so.. that kind of sucks.

Anyway, the service is still good, if you have extra money I would say get the paid version but you really won’t get anything out of it other than a bit of feel-goodness, which may dissipate quickly when you start seeing some bugs. 3 out of 5 stars for the paid version.

Doodle Jump

Doodle Jump is 99c, tons of fun, and will haunt you when you try to sleep, because you will definitely get a doodle jump effect when you close your eyes after playing for only 20 minutes. So watch out. 4 out of 5 because of the haunting.

I’ve decided that since I’ve been pumping some $$$s into the app store lately, both to check out the competition ;) but mostly to get inspired, I might as well generate some content from it. So I figured I’d reduce my ADD a bit, try to digest the app fully, and then poop out a little review.

This app is very slick. It models a real metronome in terms of the way its controlled, and you get a nice little ‘wow’ factor when you first figure out how to get it going and adjust the tempo. The controls are simple: just interact with it as you would a real metronome, or tap to start and stop the ticking. Also there is a little info button that explains the developer’s intent- apparently he is going to open source the code soon, and it was done as an exercise/demonstration of Adobe’s upcoming Flash CS 5 ‘export to iPhone’ feature. Found via Creative Applications

Instapaper is amazing and I think everyone knows it. The mobile version is great too, and the lite version is maybe-even-too good, in that I don’t feel super inclined to buy the paid version. The author includes a snippet about what features you get when you buy the full version, of which the most compelling feature is to support an independent developer, which is great. In fact, I’m going to buy it this moment. Look for a review of instapaper pro sometime soon.

Anyway, if you aren’t aware, instapaper is like readability combined with an rss reader. I’m all about focus enhancing apps, and I’ve been using readability for awhile now. Instapaper is pretty much readability on the go. This is a killer app for the iPad and I hope that Marco makes a shitton of money off of it, because he deserves it.

I bought Chromixa because it was part of the Indie+Relief charity thing, and I have to say its a really inspiring app. The idea is fresh: take your typical tangrams puzzle and have the user mix colors to fill in the shapes. My only complaint is that some of the color mixing seems non-intuitive? I’ll often be surprised when two colors combine to form white, or don’t combine at all. I guess it doesn’t follow color physics too exactly in order to simplify the puzzle, so what can you do.

I gave all of the apps five stars, and I’m going to post them on the iTunes store. Remember, developers loooove getting 5*s and love getting written comments even more, even if they are negative. I should know ;)