QuickAdvice: Be Prepared This Year With Valentine 2011
Valentine 2011 ($0.99) by Fizzle is a guide to Valentine's Day for your iPhone. It includes many things you may need to know to impress your significant other. The app offers several different features, such as: a poem generator, tips, songs, recipes, information, and the ability to send flowers. Everything here could really be found through a few quick Google searches, but what this app does is take all that useful information and conveniently put it in one place.
There are a few features that are exclusive to the app, such as the poem generator. The poem generator lets you enter a name, and then it “generates” poems. I took the time to shuffle through all the options; there is nothing unique being generated based on what is entered. It simply puts the name wherever it belongs in the poem. A lot of the poems have things along the lines of “I wrote this for you” etc. My concern is, if your significant other finds this app, and sees the same poem word for word, won’t you get in trouble? I suppose if you were clever enough to hide or erase the app you'd be safe.
The recipes portion of the app is convenient. It contains a few good Valentine's Day recipes with a simple list of ingredients and instructions. I wasn’t too impressed with the subcategory “Gifts” within the “Tips” section. Each gift idea has exactly three random products of each type of gift. It is a picture and link to an Amazon product page, and says “Amazon” awkwardly pixilated under the product. I think it would have been better to explain the different gift ideas as well as the pros and cons of each, instead of suggesting random products.
Other parts of the app like “Songs” and “Information” are more promising. The songs are in order by artist, you can click on a song and it will link you to a YouTube video of it. The information is random facts about Valentine's Day from all around the world. The user will find anything from the history of Valentine's Day, to how it is celebrated in India.
The last two main features are the ability to “Call My Valentine” and to “Send Flowers. You are able to call your Valentine right from the home screen of the app. This works by choosing a “Valentine” from your contacts in the settings, assuming he or she has a phone number listed there. The option to send flowers, is really just a web browser for a website that sends flowers. There are no built in capabilities to send flowers, it is the same as ordering them from Safari.
Overall the app tries to wow us by throwing in so many features, but I think it would have been better with less. Some of it is very neat and useful, like the information and recipes, or even the song suggestions. However, the gifts portion of tips is disappointing, as is the sending flowers feature. Maybe a quick update before Valentine's Day would be good. Though for $.99 it ofers a useful thing or two.
