It's the weekend and you're kicking around for something to do, but who can find one of those free newspapers anymore? And what if you're looking for something off the beaten path or just a cool place to eat? Ads are all fine and good, but anyone can run a decent ad. How do you know if the food's any good or who the band is tonight?
With so much going on, there's no excuse for you just to sit at home on couch playing Halo again. Get up and get out and get moving with these apps to help it all happen.
Google Places (Free)
Google Places comes in two flavors. One is the straight up app route, available at the App Store with button shortcuts and smooth graphics. The other is the online version that you can bookmark on your iPhone's home page. The information pulls from the same database, but both versions have their advantages. We find using the web-based Google Places works pretty much like a phone book for us.
Google Places on the Web
When you fire up Safari you get a list view. Topping it off are places you've starred before (helpful to shortcut places you don't want cluttering up your address book), then broad categories like restaurants, shopping, gas & automotive, lodging, etc. Tap one of those and the list expands to break those down into subcategories, such as international cuisine styles or whether you wanted a car wash or the DMV. Tap a subcategory and you get a very stripped down webpage listing various places. Each place has buttons under for phone number or to find them on a map, and so on. If someone has reviewed a place or starred it, you can get a little of that information. Go to the page for the specific locale and you get a few more details.
The web version is basically a portable replacement for the yellow pages, but it's a little featureless. This is great if you need the phone number of the closest Home Depot, but if you want a little more, the app route is the way to go.
Google Places, the app, has settled on nine default searches reminiscent of the categories in the web version. These are pretty good categories (restaurants, coffee, bars, etc.), but you can add categories as you want. We'd like to add our own custom icons to these, but Places limits your new search categories to letter icons with the name underneath. Don't like an icon anymore? Tap and hold, and just like your apps, everything begins wiggling with a delete X near the corner.
Google Places App Pages -- Best Mexican Food
Tap something that turns up in your search list and you're taken to an app optimized version of the location webpage with address, star ratings, buttons to see it on a map, get directions, call on the phone and more. Below that are extracts from reviews Google has found in other places online. Go back to the list of pizza joints or coffee shops and in the upper right there's a button that shows you all the places pinned to a map. Tap a pin and you can go directly to the site page again.
We found both versions of this service to be helpful, but for different reasons.
Goby (Free)
But let's say you wanted more specific things to do. Sure, Google Places is good at finding things in the abstract, but you want a little more concrete. Sure, there's a museum in town, but going to a static page that links to reviews of the museum and has phone numbers is kind of limited. Is there something special going on there? Yes, there's a bar that has live music, but what's the show?
Unfortunately, Google Places can't help you with that. Data is what Google Places has going for it, and what you want is timely information. Enter Goby.
Jerry, Jerry, Jerry
Tap on their cute little fish icon and you're taken to the app's home page. Here you can find cool stuff near you today, make weekend plans, or explore a new location if travel is coming your way. The idea is that Goby will go out and find events and places that are online that fall into specific categories such as things to do, food & drink, events, places to stay, then occasionally featured categories like winter fun. Tap on one of these, like things to do, and you're taken to a new list that breaks that category down into mutliple types, such as places of interest, sports & games, family fun, arts & culture.
Here's where your luck can go one of two ways. Sometimes we found very specific events such as limited run shows at museums, specific comedian concerts, times and dates and ticket prices for live performances, and more. At other times, for smaller venues, we found only general categorical descriptions as you'd find in Google Places.
Goby also seemed to want to crash whenever we had the least trouble finding things. Tap on live blues music -- Goby don't want to go there. Then you had to refire up the app and start from scratch. If your search turned up nothing at all, you were kicked back to the home screen rather than just one step back in your search. This made Goby sometimes a bit of a pain to navigate. Using the filter was an exercise in having zero effect on your search as the screen gave us a + and a - button that did absolutely nothing.
To Say the Least, This is Unhelpful
Offering check-in services for those who are interested, bookmarks to lists for finding that great little art gallery the next time around, a way to share locations through Facebook, Twitter, and in email, Goby could be extremely helpful but is too often hindered by crashes and inconsistent data. Their online portal gives you more options, as you'd expect, but once you found a show you wanted to see, the ability to check tickets from the app (just like the website) would be a killer feature to build in.
Yelp (Free)
The king daddy of restaurant and location searches, Yelp has been around longer than either of the other two, but this doesn't mean it's resting on its laurels. Stable and feature-rich, Yelp offers the check-in services many people crave complete with leaderboard scores. It also lets you bookmark places you enjoy, and gives you searches of things nearby your original search, in categories like nightlife and restaurants. Going to a comedy club? Okay, but where do you want to eat that's nearby? And where do you wan to go for drinks afterwards? Yelp puts your whole night's itinerary in their hands.
Directions? Yelp's got 'em, just like everyone else (which is to say, relying on Google Maps). Phone numbers? Yelp -- er, yep.
The Basic Restaurant List
The biggest difference in Yelp compared to other apps is in its community. Sign in with your Yelp.com account and you can check in and rise through the Yelp community ranks, write reviews, add business-related pictures to places you visit, or add a quick tip if you don't have time for a full-fledged review. This is where the leaderboard comes in to play, or if you read a review you really enjoy, you can send the author a compliment or rate their review as useful, funny, or cool. Find someone you like, and you can become friends in the Yelp community and share even more.
Some Reviewers Tackle It All
This may not seem like a lot, but we found reviewers with over 100 friends and hundreds of reviews. Tap on these reviewers and you can find all their reviews, where they are regulars, where they've achieved Yelp royalty status, and what badges they've obtained.Yelp has essentially made their app more than just a portal to finding great stuff, they've made it into your ticket into a whole community.
If mobile check-ins and localized advertising are the waves of the future, a strong community sense as in Yelp is definitely one of the keys to accomplishing that.
The Tab:
While these three apps purportedly are doing the same thing, you might want only one to do the job. If you're not pressed too much on iPhone or iPad space, try all three to find your speed. Google Places as a webpage we find an invaluable phone book replacement, while its features as an app reminded us of comparisons between Google Books and reading apps like iBooks. Sure, it gets the job done, but just barely. Yelp has a great community, the most reviews, and lets you get involved, but it's limited to places and not current events. Goby takes our money for hot stuff happening currently, though how often it crashed left a bad taste in our mouth.
In summary, we'd like to recommend one app over the other, but each had their strengths and each had their weaknesses. Google Places has efficiency, Goby has timeliness, and Yelp has community. In the end, we're more comfortable calling this one a draw rather than declaring a KO champ.
Sent from my iPhone
沒有留言:
發佈留言