Eric Stewart: Running Off At The Mouth

I’ve been waiting for some time for a particular non-free app to pop up in the Palm Pre’s App Catalog for some time.  Friday was the day.  Since I was putting in credit card info for this $3 purchase, I decided to go ahead and purchase two other apps (both also $3).  Here are the apps, what they do, and any cautions regarding the apps I might have.

1. Twee: Not covered in my original review of Twitter apps for the Palm Pre, I came across TweeFree on Preware and installed it.  I found the free version wholly useful and the color scheme (a big deal to me) infinitely more appealing than Tweed’s.  It had, as far as I could tell, all of the functionality of Tweed (and was using direct file upload rather than email, which Tweed wasn’t going to have until the pay version came available in the App Catalog).  Twee quickly became my Twitter app of choice and Tweed was quickly forgotten.  Current pricing has Twee a dollar more than Tweed, if I recall correctly (but I think Tweed will be jumping up in price after a short break in period).  The pay version includes geographic Twitter functionality, notifications, and multiple account capabilities.  The only design decision made in Twee that I’ve had some issue with is how images are handled: images are uploaded to the service before the tweet is sent.  This is good in that multiple image URLs can be sent in a given tweet, but bad in that any text you include in the tweet is not attached to the image on the hosting site in question.
2. Weatherman: Whether or not you buy this app can depend on a couple of things: How much you like to know about the weather and how attached you are to your background image.  There is a free version called Weatherman Lite, limited by what background you can use with the app (just gray on the free one vs any image you have on the pay one) and how often it will update (two days on the free version vs hourly on the pay app).  I have read critiques that the information may not be completely accurate, but haven’t noticed any issues yet (well, aside from when the last update time was almost a whole hour earlier in the morning, and the temperature was around 9 degrees off – when it updated, it felt like what the phone said it was).  This is definitely an application I went back and forth on before I bit the bullet and purchased it.  And don’t let the image fool you: Weatherman does not have neat backgrounds that change as the weather or time changes; it only overlays the weather information on the image you’ve chosen.  The one I have there I think is left over from a theme I tried once.
3. Word Whirl: I had picked up this app before it was a pay version and played it quite a bit.  The miser in me resisted strongly spending the money on updating the app; the version I had was not as limited as Word Whirl Lite, and hadn’t cost me anything.  The thing that convinced me to spend the money was that I sensed that there would be more levels (2300 according to the write up) and hopefully some of the words I knew existed but weren’t being accepted as words would be in the updated version (the classic example I can recall is when “EAST” was a word but “WEST” was not).  I haven’t verified that situation yet, but I can tell you the thing that bugs me about this app now is that some of the collections of letters their claiming as words now bother me.  Just see the sample image.  If you don’t have this yet, it might be worth your money if you’re a big fan of Text Twist.