DisCover is an app that helps you create home screen icons for your favorite music on your iPhone. I think it’s a nice idea, if you have the home screen space.
So I’ve been giving the app a try over the last few days. Hit the jump for some quick impressions on it
The concept of this app is a simple one – create as many home screen icons as you like (within the boundaries of the iPhone OS of course) for individual albums on your iPhone.
The app’s interface is also extremely basic. When you open it you get a coverflow style view of all the artists whose music you have on your iPhone. When you select an artist, all the albums that you have any tracks from by them will appear in the main screen below the coverflow list.
Wherever possible the app will show artwork for each artists / album. When it can’t find any it will show you an error message to indicate that. (a lot of mine are missing, but I think that’s the case in iTunes as well).
You just tap on an album to select it and create a home screen icon for it. When you do this, the app actually takes you out to Safari and walks you through a quick 3-tap process to get the icon added – which is exactly the method you know and love for adding a home screen icon for any web page you visit.
It would be lovely if this could all just happen behind the scenes / be done for you, but it’s not too much of a pain and is fairly quick to do. I turned off my beloved PogoPlank and filled up a home screen with some favorites without breaking a sweat during this part of things. See below for another part of the process that is no fun at all.
It was cool being able to look at a full screen of icons for a group of favorite artists, and just to tap one and hear Coltrane and Davis fire up.
Then I hit on a problem. Rather a big problem. A ‘this just doesn’t work’ sort of problem. Each time I hit an icon for another artist I got more of Coltrane and Davis. It insisted on sticking with just the one, first selected, track. I tried force quitting the app, making sure the iPod app was also shut down, and restarting the iPhone. The best I got was one success with a Fugees track, then on my next pick it was back to Bye Bye Blackbird. So I had a screen full of icons that all played just the one album.
A second big issue with this app, another that is at dealbreaker level for me, is that the coverflow view is the *only* method of finding an album. No search function. No A-Z bar to move more quickly to an artist name. No useful alternative to coverflow at all.
This quickly became a real pain in the arse to work with.
If you have enough spare home screen space, this might be a decent little app if it is made to work properly and upgraded to provide better ways to find and select music. For now though, the annoying and slow single coverflow search method is enough to put me off it. Coupled with the fact it just doesn’t work, it’s a definite non-keeper for me.
You can find DisCover in the App Store now, priced at $1.99.
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TAGS: iphone apps
