AppMiner is another app that offers to help you find all the latest and greatest apps in the App Store, as well as the best sales and discounts currently on offer in the store. Given the name, I ‘d say it would like to help you dig up hidden gems in the App Store.
It ‘s a similarly purposed app to BargainBin “ although with some key differences in approach. BargainBin focuses solely on presenting apps that have been recently reduced in price and / or discounted down to being free. AppMiner does this as well (though on a more limited set of apps), but also highlights New and Top Rated apps (not on sale or discounted).
Here ‘s an excerpt from AppMiner ‘s description page:
While other app shoppers overwhelm you with too much information, AppMiner selects only the best of the best in paid and free applications, monitoring the top 300 apps in each category and overall.
So they ‘ve already done some ‘filtering ‘ for you. I ‘m not over keen on this approach “ as I think we ‘ve all seen examples of some very good apps that don ‘t manage to break into any of the ‘Top ‘ lists.
One thing I do like about the app is that it has a cleaner interface than BargainBin, in my view. It is fairly easy to navigate, and has a few strong features
I love that when you select an app that ‘s caught your interest, AppMiner lets you see its full description within AppMiner “ it doesn ‘t jump you out to the App Store unless and until you tap on ‘Get It ‘.
I also like the ‘Watch ‘ feature. This lets you choose an app and set a desired lower price for it “ e.g. pick a $9.99 app and set its Watch level at $4.99. Once you do that, the app is placed in the Watch section and, I think, that section ‘s navigation bar button displays a red alert badge when one or more of your watched apps has hit your desired price.
AppMiner also offers a good search capability, that lets you use And, Or, and Not operators to help get better results.
One thing I ‘d like to see them add here is an option to choose whether both title and description are searched. Including the description (as it does, and as App Store searches do, by default) leads to some far less than useful results in my experience. Just as one quick example, here ‘s what searching for the words space and invaders get me, because of including the description area as well in a search:
There is an app actually titled Space Invaders, which is what I was after in this test search, but which does not even show up because of so many apps that have those words included in their description pages.
I like the fact that AppMiner gives you a look at not just apps on sale, but also new apps within the Top 300. I ‘m not fully sold on the whole concept of AppMiner doing the filtering for me and ‘choosing the best of the best ‘ sort of thing. I think it would be nice to at least have some options to let the user have more influence over what is shown. I might want to see the Top 500 (or even more) rather than 300 in certain very crowded categories. I might also want to be able to create a tab where I see new and discounted apps for only a certain set of categories that interest me.
Overall, I like AppMiner and will be keeping it around “ but I ‘d love to see some enhancements to it, and some scope for tailoring it more to my tastes.
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TAGS: iphone apps
