I love pretty things. It’s the reason I love myself as much as I do. And I just so happened to stumble across a really pretty iPhone app just before my return to the American motherland ended last week. The newest app from Tumblr app developer Mobelux, Awards is a collaboration between them and David Chartier. And it’s really a beautiful app. I’m just not sure how useful it is.
Are You Worthy?
If people you know do so many good deeds for you that you can’t keep track of em’ all in your head, you’re Awards’ target audience. Unfortunately for me, everyone I know is a [word edited]. I mean, I had to think really hard about who I could give gold stars too. I gave a couple to my parents, a friend who hooked me up with some baseball tickets, and a couple to that chick I met at that party…oh, you don’t need to hear about that. But Awards is so damn pretty that I couldn’t stop myself from playing with it. I mean, I wanted to like it. I felt as if I was supposed to like it. Just ‘cause something’s pretty however, doesn’t mean it’s worthy of your money. Although, if you’re a UI addict, Awards will do the trick.
When you fire up Awards, you can tap the plus at the bottom of the screen to add people, and then assign them stars by good deed, plus/minus icons, and by specifically entering in a numerical value. You can quickly jump between awards and people, which you can easily add in from your iPhone’s contacts. In order to add a person to your list in the app though, it requires an email address. So don’t bother trying to add your kid if they’re not old enough to have a Gmail account. Once you get all your gold stars assigned, you can choose a reward voucher to mail to recipients. If none of the rewards are appropriate, you can create your own reward voucher. The person you’re rewarding gets a beautiful voucher in their e-mail, and then whenever they claim their reward, you can hit the “redeem” button in that person’s entry in Awards, and then it’s archived away in Awards’ history.
The UI is easy to navigate. The bottom-left hand icon will quickly jump between people and awards. You can always hit up the settings in the bottom-right hand corner, and in the settings you can edit categories and events. If you need to create or edit awards, you’ll have to just switch to the awards pane. That’s about all there is to Awards. I did, however, enjoy that you can subtract so many gold stars from people that they wind up with a negative gold star count. (Special “red” status for grabby uncles, snot-nosed teens, and editors.)
Mommy Only Kinda Loves You
You might not think it’s worth its regular asking price of $1.99. It’s currently on sale for $0.99 (until September 30, 2009). You can get it in the App Store. If you think the functionality I’ve described is interesting, I’d say go for it, and pick it up. But my excitement only lasted about as long as my Levitra did.
