Cult of Mac has dubbed the new Follow Chris iPhone app an ‘ego app’ – as its sole purpose is to help you keep up with Chris Pirillo‘s prolific output on the web …
Geek blogger Chris Pirillo now has an iPhone application dedicated to him and all his prolific output: Follow Chris (iTunes Store link) is a single-person feed scraper and aggregator that pulls together content from Pirillo stuff posted on his personal site, Twitter, Lockergnome and the Geeks forum. That ‘s a lot of Pirillo.
Normally the ego app label would turn me off immediately, but I think Pirillo is one of the most consistently interesting people on the web – so I like the sound of this new app.
I’ve been trying out Follow Chris for a little while this afternoon. As I said, I like the concept of the app, but the execution on this first release could be a little better I think.
The app’s purpose is relatively simple, and its layout is very basic – which I think is a good thing. There are four main nav tabs on the bottom row of all the app’s screens – they are ‘Chris’ (which shows items from Pirillo’s main personal blog site (chris.pirillo.com), ‘Twitter’ – which displays his recent tweets, ‘Geeks’ – which shows recent Geeks forum posts, and ‘Lockergnome’, which has items from the Lockergnome site.
The display on all of these screens is very plain – just a listing of item titles. You can’t tap to expand an item and see a summary, or do much of anything except tap to open the item.
Unfortunately, the app does not feature an inline browser, so the items open in Mobile Safari – that’s a big miss I reckon. Pirillo’s main site is nicely iPhone optimized, which slightly compensates for the lack of its own browser, but both Lockergnome and the Geeks forum site are not.
I enjoy the content that this app is centered around very much, so I’ll keep it – but I’d definitely like to see some features added in future updates to it. An inline browser for sure, an ability to look at article summaries before opening an item (which might also include images so the layout would be a bit less stark), maybe some quick ways to share or recommend items – a few more bells and whistles really.
Pirillo is an uber-geek, so I imagine none of the things missing from the first release have passed him by – so hopefully we’ll see updates soon.
Follow Chris is a free app and is available now at the App Store, HERE.
UPDATE: As you can see in the comments below, Peter Birch (the developer of Follow Chris) has let us know that an inline browser is coming in an update that’s expected to be out soon. Good news.
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