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Review: Gogobot

Gogobot bills itself as a social travel site. It is part reviews, part recommendations and part passport of your travels. I’ve been using it for almost a couple years now, and I love it. It is full of terrific information that seems much realer than Yelp or similar services.

I was originally drawn to Gogobot just before I left for Switzerland. I read about this new startup that was hooking up social and travel in compelling ways and thought it might be useful. One of the cool social features is its integration with Foursquare. I hooked up my account and now it auto imports places I’ve been right into Gogobot. On occasion, I go back through and look at my recent imports. This gives me a good place to start when I want to post reviews of recent places I’ve been.

You do not have to be a Foursquare user to take advantage of Gogobot. You can add other places via their website or mobile app. I went through and added a lot of trips I took before ever having Foursquare. After you have added a few places you have been, you start building your digital passport. It gives you a nice breakdown of the countries, cities and individual places you’ve been. Sometimes I find myself just browsing it to relive old memories.

Like many other travel sites, reviews are part of Gogobot. You can add a star rating, a short text review and/or photos to any place on Gogobot. It is pretty standard stuff, but when combined with the other site features, it becomes quite handy.

One of the coolest features, and one that sets it apart from the pack, is letting users ask questions to the community. Let’s say I’m headed to Toronto for a weekend and want to know the best places to eat or how to spend my Saturday afternoon. I can head over to Gogobot and post a question. Anyone who has been to Toronto (or my friends) would automatically see my question show up in their feed. If my friends so choose, they can add places I should check out.

Something that makes Gogobot fun to use is its gamification. There are a number of badges you can earn for various things like adding photos or reviews and having other people like your reviews. Each time you do an action (even visiting the site once a day) you earn points. There is a site-wide leaderboard that you can compete to be on top of (I used to be in the top 100, but as the site grew and I explored the world less, I’m in the 300s now. Each year Gogobot chooses members with outstanding contributions and badges them as pros. I was a 2012 pro, and it was pretty cool to have that little badge on my avatar throughout the site. There are even pro meetups in major cities (SF, NYC, Chicago), but I could never attend one. Maybe next year.

I’ve watched Gogobot really grow in the last couple of years. When I first started using it, there was not a lot of content outside of some major cities, and there were not a lot of users. It has since really blossomed, and now contains a wealth of information. The site itself has added many new features like making reservations for hotels and restaurants right on the site. Overall I’m extremely pleased with it. I find it quite useful for planning trips, or even discovering cool places I want to visit someday.

App Review: Zite

Zite on iPad There’s no shortage of news readers in the App Store but Zite stands out as one of the best. Think of Zite as a personal news magazine that scours the internet to find articles you’ll enjoy. After you link a few social media services and pick a few favorite categories, Zite gets to work filling your screen with articles it thinks you’ll like. It does a really great job too.

The longer you use Zite the better it gets. If you read an article you like, just give it a thumbs up to tell Zite it’s been doing a good job. Find an article you don’t like? A simple thumbs down will let Zite know. All of this data is used to continually improve the recommendations Zite pushes to you. If you’re social media accounts are linked up it uses articles that are posted by people you follow to also improve your results. The whole system is simple but creates a great news experience.

The interface is very clean and they’ve added some nice gesture shortcuts. You can easily thumbs up or down an article by a little swipe up or down on the square. To read an article in full just tap it and it brings it up. You can use the built in “reader” mode or view the full Web page. Sharing articles is extremely easy and incorporates all your favorite social media sites, email and even “read later” services like Pocket.

You can set up favorite topics so you can always keep up to date with the latest news on Google, hockey or whatever you’re into. Articles are tagged by categories and you can click one of those tags to see more about that topic. If you like it, just star it and it’ll show up in your favorite list so you can easily stay up to date with that type of content. Your favorites influence your “Top Stories” section as well.

Zite on iPhone I started using Zite on my iPad at the suggestion of a friend and haven’t stopped using it since. After using it a while I wished there was a way to get that content elsewhere and it wasn’t long before they answered my desire with an iPhone app. The same content in a smaller on the go package.

If I had to give one complaint to Zite it’s that it doesn’t refresh content often enough. There doesn’t seem to be a way you can force a refresh and I’ll find myself flicking through articles I’ve already ready, longing for more. It does seem to randomly add articles throughout the day but I’d like a way to get more after I’ve read through them all and thumbed up and down the results.

Ok, maybe I have one more complaint or rather a request… I want a Web or desktop client. I spend at least eight hours a day at the computer and I want to keep up on my Zite reading. Sure I can pull out my iPad or iPhone but it’d be a lot nice if I could just have a browser window or a desktop app available. It’s a small thing but it’d be a great addition if you ask me.

Overall I can’t recommend Zite enough. It does more than just pull your feeds for reading, it actually learns what you like and don’t like and then presents you with a great selection of articles all over the Web. Go check it out in the App Store and let me know what you think in the comments.

Quick Review: iPad mini

Hand holding an iPad mini. Apple’s done it again. They created something that made me go “why would anyone, let alone me, want that?” This time of course it was the iPad mini but it wasn’t long ago Mr. Jobs introduced the original iPad. While it seemed kind of cool, I couldn’t figure out how it could be all that useful. Turns out I was wrong. After a few months of reading about and playing with store models, I was intrigued. Sure I couldn’t build websites or do any kind of profesional level graphic design with it but for everyday tasks it seemed great.

I was fortunate enough to start using an iPad a few months ago and instantly fell in love with it. I found most of the time having a browser, email and tons of time-wasting-but-loads-of-fun games was more than sufficient. I even started using it as an e-reader. It really shined for taking notes at meetings allowing me not to have to lug around my laptop.

Recently I got even luckier and was able to upgrade to an iPad mini. Everything I loved about the iPad but in a smaller, more ideal size. Reading on a mini is so much more convenient too. It feels about the size of novel and is easy to hold in one hand. When it was announced I thought the iPad mini would be too small to really get anything done. It turns out Apple’s picked the perfect size and weight. It’s easy to carry around, it still has a lot of space to do things and best of all it runs all of the iPad apps already out there.

I was extremely surprised how much I preferred it to a full-sized iPad. The biggest complaints I’ve read about are the lack of retina display and it’s small size. Honestly I don’t find the screen to be a big deal. Sure retina displays are beautiful but I don’t know if it’s entirely necessary (of course when the retina display does arrive, I’ll probably rave about it and be jealous I don’t have one, such is life).

As I said before the size is perfect in my opinion. The iPad was great but it always felt a little awkward to hold, especially with on hand, and was definitely hard to type without going one-finger peck style or setting it down on something. With the mini I can use the familiar two-side grasp and thumb typing I’m used to on my iPhone. Best of all it fits in an inside coat pocket rather nicely, which makes bringing it places pretty easy. I think part of the size complaints stem from how it was billed in the media as a seven inch tablet. In real life it’s much closer to an eight inches and because it’s taller than the 16:9 widescreen ratio many Android tablets use, it’s actually feels comparatively large.

Overall I’d say they’ve done a fine job. It’s not revolutionary like the original iPad but it definitely improved on some of my iPad complaints. The iPad mini is a fun little tablet with a great size, decent price and all the App Store goodness iOS devices provide. I have to highly recommend it.

App Review: Solar

Every once in a while I stumble across an app that truly makes me smile. Often it’s resulting from an out-of-the-box way of thinking about user interface and experience. Solar is one of those apps that brought an instant smile to my face.

Solar is, at its most basic level, a weather app. But that doesn’t do it justice. It’s like no weather app you’ve ever seen before. Screenshots won’t even do it justice, you need to experience it. This video will give you a basic idea but I’m telling you, until you have it in your hand and start scrolling through the hours of the day you can’t fully appreciate how cool it is.

In many ways it seems like Solar is the Clear of weather apps. It’s completely simple and doesn’t have all the bells and whistles other apps might boast. That doesn’t matter because it is useful. Very useful. And it does what it does very well. Not to mention it’s fun to use and beautiful.

If you appreciate good user interface and user experience design you should download this app. If you are looking for a simple, easy to use and fast weather app, Solar is the answer. If you’re looking for a weather app with radar and news, this one’s not for you. Check it out in the App Store.

App Review: Clear for iPhone

You probably have heard about Clear, the to-do list app that made a big splash a couple of months ago with its extremely simple and unique interface. It truly is an app that thinks outside the box when it comes to user experience. I immediately downloaded it because the interface was just so different and intriguing I had to touch it. I played with it for a while, added some tasks and lists, deleted some, changed themes and thoroughly enjoyed the quirky little app. Clear is great. It’s ground-breaking even. It totally re-imagines user interactions. That’s all well and fine but is it useful?

Some would say Clear’s lack of fancy bells and whistles is what makes it great. There aren’t any buttons and you add, delete and re-arrange with swipes and gestures. This part really works well and I think it’s an improvement over other list apps I’ve used. To fully appreciate the UI, you really need to use it but this video does a good job walking through it.

The simplicity that makes it great is also what makes it so frustrating. If you want to view your list on a computer, you’re out of luck. Clear doesn’t synch up with any of your beloved services. You won’t find any iCloud or Google here. I assume they feel everyone has their iPhone with them all the time. While that is true (for me at least) I also am at my computer the majority of the day and would love to have my iCal or Google Calendar to effortlessly synch my tasks from Clear. Sometimes it’s easier to manage these tasks on the device I’m using and not have to pull out my phone and open an app just to check an item off my list. I don’t think this is necessarily a deal-breaker but it’s certainly annoying.

The biggest downfall of Clear is its lack of dates. You can create a task for anything but you can’t assign a due date to it. Sometimes it’s really nice to know a bill is due on such-and-such date so you make sure it’s in the mail on time. I would like these date-assigned tasks to show up in my calendar so when I’m looking at what’s going on today, I can see a task that needs to get done too. Again, this begs the question, “how simple is too simple?”

Visually, Clear isn’t much to look at (but in a good way). It’s basically just rectangles of tasks. That’s pretty much all it needs to be. They offer a variety of themes that change those rectangle’s colors. You can earn “bonus” themes by having other apps (for example, Path) and games installed or following team members on twitter. I’ve even read that completing 100 tasks unlocks a theme. That’s a nice little Easter egg. It would probably be nice if you could design your own themes. It probably wouldn’t be hard to allow you to pick your own set of colors, but that complicates the app and goes against the simplicity they’re going for.

Screen shots of the Clear app

Overall I like Clear. I still use it but to-do lists for me always seem like such a great idea until I forget about them. Clear is fun and useful. I’m making an effort to remember to use it everyday. I wish it had a few more features to it (perhaps due dates with alerts could remind me to use it more) but its unique interface is very refreshing and might just make up for its lack of features.

You can check out Clear in the App Store.