Today it’s Thursday and it’s time for our weekly free app reviews. Each Thursday, AppleLunch will provide you with reviews of free apps from the App Store to separate the wheat from the chaff. Today, we will decide what to see next time in the cinema, and brighten up someone’s path.
Trailers International
Trailers International is developed by xTeo who has also made a similar application, named Trailers.
Alright, let’s get started. The first screen that appears, is a list of movies, which I had no clue about when I downloaded the free app (a joke, laugh, laugh) and I decided of course to take a closer look at it. I wasn’t familiar with any of the titles that I was given, but that might be caused by my eager to see movies in the cinema.
Finally I found an interesting title that I wanted to know more about: “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” it is called. I noticed in the list that the movie features George Clooney, Ewan McGregor and Kevin Spacey and will be released December 03 2009. I tapped the movie cover, and suddenly the movie trailer started to play, actually in pretty nice quality.
The movie trailer has a length of 2:23 and it was really funny. It might be one of those movies that I will watch in cinema. Next, I tapped the info right next to the movie cover, and I was shown more details about the movie, and four buttons: “Imdb”, which leads to Imdb’s info page about the movie, a star shaped button, which will add the movie to “my favorites,” “Movie Site” which led m to a yellow page (might be some kind of error), and finally the button called “Trailer 1,” which will start playing the trailer of tapped.
Lowest on the screen is a navigation bar. The leftmost button shows you a resume of the movie, if tapped. The left-arrow button leads to the movie before “The Men Who Stare at Goats” on the list, which appeared when the application started up, and the mirrored button leads to the next. The play button plays the trailer (yes, it’s basically the application’s core function) and the last button is a “refer a friend” button, from which you can send out an e-mail about the movie. The two navigation buttons though, are more or less superfluous, because if you swipe the screen left or right, you will get to the next and the previous movie title.
We will now get back to the movie list, because we aren’t finish with the application at all. It has extremely many functions. As I mentioned before, it is possible to create a favorite list of movie trailers and that you can find in the top by tapping the “Favorites” button.
In the button of the screen is a button called “Dates” and it sorts the whole list after by release dates of the movies, starting with the next release day of a movie. The next button gives you a search function so that you can search if you want information on a specific movie release you can type the title in the search bar.
The next button is maybe the second most interesting feature in the application. It is the “Downloads” page, and yes, you CAN download the movie trailers if you want! To download a movie trailer, head back to the trailer list, and tap the download button, which is the round button with a down arrow. Afterwards a notification badge appears in at the “Downloads” button. Tap it, and tap “Start” to download the trailers. After this you can turn off your WiFi and/or EDGE/3G and still see the entire trailer that you have downloaded. Brilliant feature, if you want to show a trailer to a friend or a family member, that has no connectable WiFi connection.
Right next to the “Downloads” button is a “More” button that you might be familiar with from many other iPhone applications, for example the iPod application. In the “More” section, you can choose to sort the movie trailers by actors, directors, genres, studios or you can even shuffle them if you want some random trailers.
This review is soon coming to an end, but we want to mention some more stuff before deciding how good it is. In the upper left corner you can see the British flag. If you tap it, you can choose between ten different countries in Europe. Since we live in Denmark, it’s obvious to chose Denmark from the list, and then we will get release dates in Denmark and Danish movies too on the list.
The very last thing from the application we want to show is the “Movie cover” screen. To activate it, just tilt your iPhone or iPod Touch to horizontal and now you can navigate through movie titles by swiping left or right.
You might probably have guessed already that this application is worth to be more than a free application. It is one of the best free applications that we have ever tested and to movie enthusiasts, it is a must-have. It has so many features and possibilities, and I can’t see a single argument why it should not be top-rated.
5/5 STARS
Get the app from iTunes App Store
Flashlight
Flashlight is developed by John Haney Software, inspired from his daughter and wife.
This is the first review ever, where I had to turn of the light in order to make a true review of an application. This is because the application actually is meant to be a flashlight, that you can use in situations where you can’t see nothing, because… well, it’s dark and only the fewest of people have nightvision.
So, I turned off the light, the TV, my computer screen, my MacBook display, my backlit keyboard and everything else that produced some kind of light, and that gave me some trouble finding back to my seat, but I made it without getting seriously hurt, and now I wanted to light up my room with my iPhone.
… But it disappointed me. The application didn’t produce enough light so I could see the other end of the room, which is only a few meters, but then it came to me that I could change the brightness in the iPhone’s settings. I changed it to the brightest, and reopened the application, and now the application lightened up my entire room, and I could easily stand up and walk around, without trampling in to something.
The standard color in flashlight i white, but you can change it to the color you want, and even black is an opportunity. You can also swipe your finger up or down to brighten or darken the light, and if you want to go to the settings menu, just tap and hold in the middle of the screen and release when you’re told to.
Green light, go!
In Settings you can navigate to “Special Effects” and turn that on, but remember to read the warning note, which tells you about seizure. The special effects includes S.O.S. morse code, trippy, deep trippy, Smooth, Yin-yang, 6-sided and chasers, and you can see some of them below.
The application is generally below middle in creativity and it surfers from limits in brightness. If it is dark and you want a flashlight, but doesn’t have one, it makes almost the same level of flash if you just opens the Settings on the iPhone and turns up the brightness. You doesn’t need an application to light up for you.
2/5 STARS
Get the app from iTunes App Store
It has a credit card reader, barcode scanner and signature application… and though it’s housed in hard plastic shell so the original iPod Touch design is hidden, it’s still much more handy looking than most of the currently existing retail store checkout systems out there.
