App You’ll Be ‘Appy With And Another You Won’t!
There are Apps that turn out to be surprisingly useful and those that promise much but are unremittingly awful.
Two recent releases illustrate each of these characteristics well.
First the stinker, heralded loudly by Google, but giving the impression of having been dreamed up in the bath and worked up in a lunch hour.
This is AutoDraw, which claims to “turn your sketches into art.”
What it actually does is to turn a handful of strokes on the screen into the most primitive clip art imaginable.
Draw two rough circles connected by a couple of shaky lines, and AutoDraw will suggest you might be trying to draw a bicycle.
Agree and Googles unbelievably crude bike graphic will replace your scrawl.
You can have the whole thing in any colour, but not wheels in one colour, frame in another.
The result is no longer your own work.
Google’s offering is vastly inferior to many available by keying “bicycle clip art” into its search engine.
So, with what purpose did they launch this drivel?
Meanwhile, the proposition presented for Energy Bar looks somewhat unpromising.
It shows an Android device’s battery level. Well, excuse me, I thought, Android does that already.
Load it up, though, and it does the job so much better, overlaying the status bar on the screen with a vibrant, full width, visual indication of the remaining charge.
Highly customisable with a choice if colour combination and bar thickness, it makes that all-important indication of juice level easier to interpret in an unexpected and imaginative way.
This free App’s developers have solved a problem that few people will have known they had.
