Each Friday for the foreseeable future, we’ll be showcasing a handful of recently launched applications from the iPhone App Store. Generally, we’ll highlight the best apps to hit our inbox, shining a guiding light on the gems that might otherwise get lost in the endless torrent of app releases. Unfortunately, the best apps to hit our inbox this week .. really weren’t very good. Read. Comment. Enjoy.
App #1 – Short Hand: This app sounded pretty cool at first. Short Hand allows you to create text “shortcuts” (such as “wrudt”) that automatically change into pre-programmed phrases (such as “what are you doing tonight?”) Perfect for those with fat fingers who still have a hard time with the iPhone keyboard, right? Unfortunately not. Though the app is well-designed, it doesn’t make messaging on the iPhone easier. If you find yourself writing the same things over and over in e-mails and tweets, you’re doing it wrong. And, honestly, do you really need a shortcut program to write 140-character tweets? Bottom line: good in theory, useless in practice. If it were on a platform where it could be tied into all applications, it might be useful – but it’s not, so it isn’t.
App #2 – Frog Guitar: Whaa?! Sometimes we get an app in our inbox that makes us wonder: why did someone make an app for that? This week, Lewellen’s $.99 Frog Guitar by Smort is that app. In short, it’s four frogs strung up across the screen which you can tap or strum to coax a noise out of. The graphics are decent, but the futility of the app kills it. As bad as it sounds, the highlight of the app is when you poke any given frog too much and they pop. Not worth $0.99. Next!
App #3 – CardWar: So there are a lot of card apps for the iPhone. I dare you to find one more useless than the $0.99 CardWar, which lets you play the timeless classic classic time-waster, War, on your iPhone. Its you against the computer (no player vs. player support). You tap the screen and it shows two cards, and the highest one wins. Whoever finishes their 54-card-deck first, wins. Yep, that’s all folks. No, seriously – there’s nothing else to it.
Are you a developer? Think you’ve got an app worth checking out? Shoot us an e-mail at tipsATmobilecrunchDOTcom (with the obvious substitutions in place, of course).