I recently downloaded the application ‘NOW’, which is interesting. I found it because it is similar to what I am making for my thesis. The idea is that it is a map of what is going on around you right now. It pulls data from instagram and Vine to figure out where people are. It doesn’t feel like what it is a native application, runs a little slow and the design, while nice, seems like it was a web app that was embedded into the iPhone.
It has a menu that pops up which I don’t like as much as a toolbar and it runs a little slow, but that may be due to my phone being old. I do like when you expand a view to see all of the photographs that some are different sizes than others, like what Facebook has done with the newsfeed.
It uses a condensed typeface which is fine for the tittles, but in areas where there is more writing, like tweets describing the events it gets to be a bit difficult to read.
It regularly has the map displayed at the top third of the screen, but doesn’t let you expand the map which is a bit annoying because I would like to see where everything around me is when I click on the map.
The application is also sparsely populated. While it is supposed to be about sharing things that are happening now, all that it displays is events that occurred in the past. This is problematic because the application doesn’t do what it sets out to do. While one could argue that that is because the application is not popular yet, it really doesn’t make a difference because the data is being drawn from instagram and vine instead of users posting so it is a flaw in the design of the application. When I sign on I want to find out what to do now, rather than see all the things that happened in the past that I can never go to.
It also has these cute little icons, and when you click one on the menu page the map displays the icon to let you know what page you are on, but it doesn’t say the name of the page, like “Local” or “Sports” which is inconvenient because their are 12 categories which is too many to memorize what all of the icons stand for.
http://www.getnowapp.com