QuickAdvice: Never Miss Your Favorite Artist's Concert Again With Shows on iPhone
Shows ~ don't miss a gig ($2.99) by Samuel Vermette is an app that helps you keep track of concerts from your favorite bands - the ones that matter to you.
You love music. We all do (or should, at least). Concerts are fun, but they're even better when they're of your favorite band, right? But keeping track of when your favorite bands are playing can be a bit of a task. Well, that's going to change now with Shows ~ never miss a gig.
Shows will sync with your iPod.app library, so you don't need to worry about adding every band you like manually. But you will need to initially select the artists from your library that you want to see shows for. However, just because it syncs with your iPod artists doesn't mean that you can't add artists that you may not currently have on your device (rotation is nice). If you hit the + in the corner, you can manually add in artists that you want to know upcoming shows for. There is autocomplete when typing an artist name to make life easier.
When you have all your artists, the main screen displays them and the number of upcoming shows. If there aren't any shows, there won't be a number associated with the group. You can view this list either by Artist or Date. There's a gear button that you can tap on to view shows based on proximity: walking distance to flights.
Based on the proximity distance, the shows that are near you will be displayed in white. Otherwise, they will be grey. This is a great way to differentiate local shows from those that are far away.
If you tap on an artist, you can see all of their upcoming shows organized by month and day, and even see the location. Tapping on a location will show you specifically what venue they will be playing at and an option to display a map to see exactly where it is.
But what good is knowing when and where a show is without friends to go with you? Luckily, Shows provides you easy ways to share this concert information with others. There is Facebook and Twitter integration, as well as options to send the link to the show information by email or SMS. The link displays artist name, location, venue, date, and options to tweet or share on Facebook.
Now, how do you go back to your artist listing once you view details on a specific show? Simple. The beautiful and slick interface allows you to simply slide left-to-right to go back a screen. The transition animation is smooth and beautiful, and shows that there was a lot of time devoted to the app.
But what good is an app that tells you about upcoming gigs for your favorite artists without push notifications? No worries, Shows will notify you whenever there is newly announced show for your favorite groups. This way, you're never left out of the loop.
All of the data that Shows displays is pulled straight from Last.fm, one of the biggest online music communities, so it's safe to say that the data is always up-to-date.
So far, Shows is proving to be an extremely useful app to help you stay in the loop of your favorite artists and upcoming shows. The interface is beautifully designed and great to look at while providing you with very useful information. The icon is also a nice addition to any home screen.
However, I do wish that there was a way to buy tickets for these shows from within the app. As of now, there is no way to buy tickets - you'll have to manually buy them from a source like Ticketmaster. It would also be easier if the app would just import all of your iPod artists without the need to check them off.
Aside from these issues, the app is still worth a buy if you want to stay informed of where your favorite artists are playing. Never miss a show again!
Please note: The $1.99 price we have in our AppBase is for the 1.x version. With the UI revamp in 2.x, the app has had a price tag of $2.99. Sorry for the confusion.
