Thursday is Teahouse/Tea Room, Accessory and Brand Review Day!

I’ve been on a roll with reviewing these iPhone and iPod Touch applications lately. There seem to be more everyday and each is a little different. Some provide custom timer options, others limit you to specified choices. How does Tea Timer by Decane fare?

Every tea timer application seeks to differentiate itself. In fact, it’s the very point of writing the apps in the first place. There’s something these developers believe they can improve upon versus their competition.

Most all of these application start out with some basic list screen. You’ve got your teas, boom! This application by Decane is no different in that regard.

Tea Timer by Decane

What is different about their take on a Tea Timer application is their trend to keep it basic. There aren’t any extra widgets or tabs. You’ve got timers and you run them. It’s a wonderful example of practicing restraint from feature creep.

Tea Timer is also the only app I’ve reviewed so far which allows you to reorder your timers. It doesn’t do it for you by alphabetical listing and it doesn’t keep them in the order you create them. While I admit it’s not the most important feature in the world, I have found myself enjoying the freedom to arrange my list as I see fit. It comes in handy when running a more structure tasting session for example.

The beauty of this interface is how it falls in line with Apple’s own example with the Clock application. Not particularly novel, but instantly recognizable and simple for the user to figure out based on rudimentary experience with the iPhone and iPod Touch platform.

Editing the Timers

Creating a new timer is fairly standard. The on interesting option is that you can toggle whether a particular timer allows you to pause it. I’m not certain what circumstances would call for this feature, but it’s an interesting one to have.

I think inviting the user to enter a “name” for their timer instead of “the display text” would have been more user friendly. It’s a odd move considering the relative usability of the rest of the application.

Creating a New Timer

Selecting the alarm sound takes you to another screen where you select the sound from a list of options. Oddly, none of these options are existing ringtones you may have and instead are custom sounds provided with the application. So if I should want to have “Katie’s Tea” as my Tea Timer sound, I couldn’t do that.

Also, when selecting a timer sound, running through the list seems to have an issue where when playing one sound then selecting another has the first sound continue playing. This is somewhat irksome especially if the first sound happens to annoy me greatly. Selecting another sound should kill the first, before playing the second.

Running a timer is pretty straight forward. You have the name of the tea, the time left on the timer, a restart button if needed and a picture of a stopwatch in the background. The stopwatch is a bit out of place seeing as you’re running a timer, but the idea comes across properly and I doubt most users are as interface anal as I am.

Running a Timer

Overall I would say $2 ($1.99) is a bit much for such a basic application but Tea Timer by Decane is a good effort to create a tea timer program for the iPhone. I still don’t think it’s perfect. There are certainly a few issues to fix and I could see room for some additional but still basic features.

Pros

• Can create custom timers
• Can reorder timers
• Can select a custom sound for each timer

Cons

• When selecting a timer sound it continues to play even after you select another
• You can’t select an existing ringtone as a timer sound

Thursday is Teahouse/Tea Room, Accessory and Brand Review Day!

This application is the sibling application of “Tasting Notes”. But in the case of “Tea Tasting Notes” from App Shop, LLC… I’m seriously disappointed.

“Tea Tasting Notes” or “Tea Notes” as the icon labels itself on my iPhone, is an attempt to grow beyond the parent application reviewed last week here on Tea-Guy. This app however, only tackles tea. It expands on what the parent app has and tries to answer all of my issues from it’s parent. What we all hope for from our children.

I absolutely love the way this application attempts expands itself from a weak solution to something more robust, allowing you to select and expand the field listings and even add more star ratings into the mix.

Tea Tasting Notes

Press the edit button at the top and this application provides a very simple method to allowing you to expand on its existing options. You can easily expand using template designs, or create your own new fields. While you can’t unfortunately reorganize existing sections… you can at least add new sections with their own fields into the mix. Rather than rehashing last week’s review and again explaining why I feel the way I do about customizability… you could read it.

Editing the Sections

Diving into the editing capabilities of this app, I have to say, virtually all of my complaints were easily mastered. You can create your own fields and specify what kind of data the field should represent. You can even create more star rating objects, very handy for me when considering my differentiation is handling the review of flavor, aroma and boldness as separate scales.

Editing the overview options

Editing the ratings options

Editing the details options

“Well…” you ask… “What’s the problem then? Why do you dislike the application? Why did you give it a 1/5?”

Let me tell you… for all the bonuses this application gets for tacking most of my quibbles… for all it does to advance interface wise and to expand it’s customizability… it sucks because it’s buggier than a termite infestation!

But it's buggy

After creating the first review with this application… my main notes screen wigged out on me and appeared as the above. I tried exiting the app, it didn’t help. I tried reinstalling the app, that didn’t help either. I also tried adding more reviews to see if that’d kick it into gear. No go.

On top of that… the app crashes when trying to email a review to someone. And when taking photos for the reviews, the app reports that it cannot add the photo as it couldn’t save it. This while I had no issues with any other apps on my iPhone including Twitter apps, the iPhone camera app and even a silly mustache novelty application.

What’s most disappointing is that it comes so close to getting everything right… and then it let’s bugs in where everything matters.

Pros

• Can create custom fields for just about anything
• Can add extra star ratings fields
• Can record tea notes

Cons

• WOW is it bug-tastic!
• Extremely tap happy interface
• Can’t take photos any longer
• Can’t send emails any longer
• Parts of the interface are quirky (adding a new note, recording a web address into a note)

In fact, the three dollar ($2.99) app is so bad, it can’t even be found on the App Store any longer. How’s that for confidence? I hope the developer is working on improving the reliability of this application for re-posting. I can really see it being a 4/5 if it weren’t so bug friendly.

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