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The hottest apps coming out of Tech Crunch Disrupt, Androider’s are going to see a
whole lot of chops soon and an honest look at the much hyped turntable.fm IOS app today
on App Judgment. This episode of App Judgment is brought to
you by Net Flix
Welcome to App Judgment, your source for mobile application news and reviews, I’m Graham
Hancock and I’m Mauricio Balvanera and this week has been, the beginning of this week
has been all about Tech Crunch. Huge conference here in San Francisco, lots of start ups actually
making their first, initial announcements. Right. Pitches to people out there, to show
the world what problems they're solving, so they're Disrupting things. I feel like South
by Southwest used to be, the event where everyone launched their applications, and it still
is, but it's turning more and more toward Disrupt for the major releases every year.
Right, they had so many new apps come out this week just because they've been waiting
to announce them on a platform like this conference. And the set will be taking a critical look
at turntable.fm for IOS, which was also released at Tech Crunch Disrupt. It was just released
earlier today, actually, but first let's take a look at the top mobile app releases and
news that you clicked on at twitter.com/App Judgment.
Spool promises to be your instapaper on steroids. That's right, any time I hear instapaper of,
I get excited. It's sort of like the foursquare of blah, blah, it's the same thing with this.
You’re a huge instapaper user I know that, I'm sort of lukewarm to the thing, I'll bookmarked
stuff but I never go back. I understand lots of people do that, and that's really fine.
What school promises to do is take all content and send it to your IOS, and actually the
presenter made a really good argument for this, he showed us multiple tabs to open,
so when I go on an airplane I open up all of these tabs, because people have a habit
of doing that. So basically this is just scraping the material the way instapaper does but it
will do video, it will do all kinds of content on the website. It was a really cool presentation
actually, in the way he pitches it, the way he sort of explains the way it works is interesting,
it's not so much, their overall goal is to know which websites you're going to visit
before you even know you're going to go visit them so those websites can be cached on your
phone and you can pull it up without even having Internet access because it's already
been sent on your phone. To me that's a pretty nice, I don't know it's just an improvement
on browsing the Internet on a mobile device. I don't like typing in URLs, this seems to
be solving that problem. So I'm excited for them. We'll see, it's not out yet, we haven't
really taken a look at it aside from the demo at Disrupt. It looks promising
Also, Posterous has updated its website and mobile app to Posterous Spaces, and it's taken
a big page from Google+ circle. Check out this quick video explanation.
When we go online, it's really hard for us to control who sees what because what gets
shared on Facebook, usually ends up getting shared with everyone on Facebook. What you
really need is a simple easy way to share the stuff you care about with the people you
want from anywhere you want. Too bad that's impossible, right? Well, actually that's exactly
what posture as spaces is about.
So that's Posterous Spaces, very similar to Google+ Circles. I couldn't help but notice
like, they're directly copying that idea. But Facebook has in line, sort of circle functionality
now too. It looks like Google came up with a really good idea and everyone is kind of
implementing and on all their platforms. It is a hot idea, are you actually using your
circles. I actually don't use them as often now, I sort of made my Google+ into what my
twitter stream is, I’m just broadcasting out to everyone and I may have a few select
groups, like a circle of just friends of mine back home and things like that, but I'm almost
always posting publicly on Google+. I put people in circles but everything's been public
so. The idea might be hot… It's a new concept in social network, so everyone's kind of figuring
out where it fits so. Exactly.
Beginning this fall all Verizon Android phones will ship with Chomps app search engine. Now
Chomp, it's been around for a while, they are an app search engine company that essentially
allows you to search for apps based on the content of the app, not the title and not
the description. If you try to search for restaurant guides in iTunes, you're going
to get just tons of stuff like bad results. Same with the Android store. Chomp set out
to solve that problem by creating an algorithm that searches for what apps can actually do
and so when you search for a restaurant guide or racing games or hunting games, you're going
to get a good curated list of apps that do those things. They do a really good job at
it, I'm not sure, we may have reviewed it already, but if we haven't it's a download.
It's a good one. So now their service is being integrated into all Verizon Android phones
which is a huge deal, it's great to see them getting recognized by a major carrier. It's
big news for Androiders because I think there's a lot of services that are able to scrape
the iTunes Store and there are applications for new releases, but I really haven't seen
that for Android so I think this will really help them out. Cool.
Finally, let's run quickly through the most noteworthy app releases and updates. Gift
creator, gift camera for IOS is now free. TBS released their iPad, great for their next
Prince of Bel Air marathon.
Androiders, go played Third Blade right now. Now, now, now now now. It's free. Gowalla
is turning into a social travel guide after losing the location war. This is another Tech
Crunch story, but the app hasn't updated yet to just keep an eye on this one. Tofu two,
the sequel to our recently reviewed IOS game is out and it's free. And Formspring question-and-answer
website releases their IOS app as well today. And finally update Jetpack Joyride for a new
vehicle called Mr. Cuddles, and we understand that is a giant fire breathing dragons that
you ride on top of to collect more coins. That sounds, amazing Jetpack Joyride, I love
that came, it's really good.
Okay let us know what your favorite app releases have been lately in the comments and Annie
might just give you props. And I'll be taking a critical look at turntable.fm in a second,
but speaking of Annie let's get social with her.
Thanks guys, let's get a little social shall we. So updates are a good thing, right? Interface
tweaks, bug fixes, healthy progress. As it turns out, not all the time. On our Facebook
page, Gil Goldstein sent out a warning do not update the Facebook IOS app to the latest
version 3.5, he says on his 3GS running 4.3.4 it crashes whenever he starts it. And Ronan
also add that it's full of bugs.
And Facebook isn't the only one to have update problems; rumor has it that the latest update
of Tiny Wings 111 has been causing some headaches as well. That sounds incredibly itchy, and
irritating and probably unsanitary. So if your current specs do match those you may
want to proceed with caution. And let's hope it that especially Facebook does take care
of that because Lord knows a lot of people use it, not just for stalking these days but
for regular communication.
And finally we’re trying to settle as score on cloud music. We ask you guys a poll what
cloud music service are you using now and as of now, the Google's music beta is the
big winner, followed by Pandora and Spotify. So far we are not so sweet on Amazon or iTunes
match, interesting. So jump on our Facebook page and let us know what you're using currently
and why. CDs, tape decks, barber shop quartet, that would be awesome. Let us know,
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Hey guys, most of you have heard about the social music sites, turntable.fm by now. It's
a site that lets you join the room and purée the playlist for the crowd of people to hear.
It allowed anyone who's ever fantasized about being a DJ to actually give it a shot. The
site took off about four months ago and just skyrocketed to popularity and now, just today,
they released their iPhone app. So how does the turntable.fm experience hold up on the
iPhone. For the most part, the experience is exactly the same. Just login with your
Facebook account, start a new room or join one that's already hopping. You can rate songs
that play in the room, and you can jump in the DJ seat to add your songs to the queue.
You can also chat with the folks who were listening and you can share with your friends
on Facebook and twitter. While the experience is solid at first, we get the sense that this
app isn't quite ready for prime time. We experienced quite a few bugs while we were using the app
today. We were randomly being kicked out of the room, song searches would complete, and
a few of us had trouble logging in. This was on both IOS four and five amongst the entire
office. Hopefully we can attribute this to launch day woes on the server side of things,
but that's not the end of our gripes. The phone interface doesn't give you the option
to save info about the song that is playing to you other music services, like the web
version does. So far there's no iTunes, Amazon, Spotify support. And no support to add the
currently playing songs in the queue. And that brings us to our main issue, songs searching
may as well have been left out of the app entirely. It barely worked for us. Song searches
would come up with nothing, while on the web interface we would immediately find what we
were looking for. So real quick, getting to the pros, it's a unified experience with the
web version and it looks really good. It's also great for music discovery. Now with the
cons, the app just seems rushed overall, the song search is somewhat broken and managing
your queue is very tricky. Also there's no song previews so when you're searching for
a song you can't listen to it before adding it to your queue. So that's our take on the
turntable.fm for iPhone app. Now were saying that it may turn out into a very robust music
discovery app, once the launch date blues are taking care of. But for right now wait
a while for the next update, continue to enjoy using the web version at turntable.fm and
don't download turntable.fm for iPhone out just yet.
I'm Graham Hancock, you've been watching App Judgment so be sure to subscribe to us on
YouTube, like us on Facebook and say hello to us on twitter. See you next time.