Unit Convertors—probably one of the most frequently used utility apps in one’s day-to-day life. And for someone like me, who has “exceptionally good” mathematical skills, they become a necessity. In the past, I’ve taken a look at Convertbot, one of the speciality bots from the den of Tapbots. Needless to say, throughout the review, I couldn’t stop singing praises for the UI of the app. But there was a little learning curve tagged along that was needed to use the app, since the app took a detour from the usual UI practices. Tapbots mention that they wanted to make the whole experience fun to the user. Thus, there was plenty of room on the App Store for unit convertor that was simple, quick and easy to use and one that had no learning curve attached to it. Enter, Convert.
Convert, from Taptaptap, is a sparkling new unit convertor that’s fast, extremely easy to use and one that just works to get the job done. All this with a very elegant UI that has just the right amount of thought put into it.
The AppAppApp
Convert features a neatly laid out UI that has the numpad controls at the bottom and conversion type at the top. The types of conversions are available through the iPhone’s native DataPicker UI, so there’s no going round and round for choosing something. You can tap once on the black bar to bring up the names and jump to the one you wish to convert or you may directly scroll through the entire list. This has been so nicely implemented that it’s butter smooth. As you scroll through the conversion types, the names and icons magnify as the pass below the little glass bar in the center and while this isn’t really a necessity, it does add a touch of class to the app.
One really interesting feature of Convert is that it supports Favorites. You can ‘favorite’ your most frequently used conversion types and tapping the blue star button will quickly jump through your favorites. Much like Convertbot, Convert will update the currency rates from their servers, or you can do it manually by tapping the little orange refresh button. Convert supports a whole lot of currencies, but unfortunately, there’s no way to show up only a select few of them in the app.
The Conversion
Confirming the type of conversion then brings up all the units in that section. Again, selecting the ‘from’ unit and ‘to’ unit is just as easy as choosing the conversion type. Conversions are done as you type and the app also allows you to copy the values from the app. Need to swap the from and to units? No worries, just tap the unit you want to convert from and the direction of the arrow changes, thus allowing you to convert back.
The Calculator
Convert also features a calculator integrated into the app. Not only is there a dedicated calculator mode that let’s you do your calculations with the same elegant UI, but you can also perform calculations on your conversion values. Don’t know how much is 4 times 0.006532 inches? No problem, the calculator will help you.
This was one of the few features missing in Convertbot, and apparently, it’s being introduced in Convertbot v1.4 that’ll hit the store in a few weeks.
The Verdict
It’s no surprise that Convert has replaced Convertbot for me. It’s the simplicity of the app that just makes me launch the app for those quick conversions and quit out of it once I’m done. At $0.99 at the App Store, Convert gets the highly recommended tag from me. I just have one nagging complaint about the app. I wish the Default.png was better looking.
