AppAdvice for iPad Gives Muddled Guidance

AppAdvice's iPad app offers a great deal of information, but its layout is confusing. If you want to find all the latest app reviews, for instance, there's no way to do it. There's a nice feature called "AppFresh Daily," but to find it, you've got to go hither and thither through the news stream. Most maddening is the apparent absence of certain features described in the program's App Store entry.

AppAdvice, an app from App Advice, is available for US$1.99 at the App Store.

AppAdvice

With more than 300,000 programs in Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) App Store, keeping tabs on all of them can be quite a chore for an iPad owner. Maybe what you need is an app to manage your app knowledge.
Sure, the App Store itself offers some navigational and evaluation aids for folks browsing for apps.
There's a Featured section that displays Apple's picks for the game and app of the week, as well as "new and noteworthy" and "staff favorites" apps, and a Genius section that recommends apps to you based on apps you've downloaded in the past.
The Top Charts section shows you the current top paid and free apps and the top grossing apps of all time, and the Category section lets you browse apps by a score of topics -- books, finance, games, news, reference, sports and such.
In addition, you can obtain some evaluative information about individual apps from user ratings and reviews.
All those features are helpful, as far as they go, but if you're an app browser looking for the absolute latest information on apps and expert reviews of them -- and if you don't mind a disorganized approach to news and other foibles -- then you'll want to take a peek at AppAdvice.

Random Story Placement

"AppAdvice?" you ask. "Isn't that a website?" Yes, it is. What the iPad app does is repackage the content from the website in real time and present it in a more accessible way.
When you launch AppAdvice, three columns of stories appear in uniform boxes. Each box has a graphic at its top, followed by a small headline and some text. In landscape mode, there's a fourth column for featured content.
More content is immediately visible on the app's front page than on the website. You can view six stories at one time compared to two or three at the website.
Stories are placed on the page roughly based on the times that they're posted to the website. But there's no way to discern that by perusing the app's front page, as the stories' time stamps aren't included in their layout boxes.
Since all the stories are given equal weight -- same size, same headline size -- there's no way to determine which stories are more important than another. So a story about the next-generation iPad can end up buried beneath "the fold," while a story about a simple app update can end up in a more prominent position because its time stamp is newer than the 2G iPad's.

Missing Features

The featured well in landscape mode highlights older stories. They can be news ("'Angry Birds': 12 Million Copies Sold"), reviews ("Review: 'Infinity Blades' -- Does It Live Up To the Hype?) or help columns ("Now You Can Have Videos In a Flash").
When you tap on a story, a full version of it appears in a window. At the end of a piece, there's a button to add comments to it and see the comments of others, as well as a link to any apps mentioned in the story and articles related to it. If you want to tell a friend about the piece, you can email a link to it from within it.
AppAdvice's grab-bag approach to the way it places information on a page may be adequate for quick browsing, but it's confusing for anyone wanting to find anything. If you want to find all the latest app reviews, for instance, there's no way to do it. There's a nice feature called "AppFresh Daily" that lists apps released in the last 24 hours, but to find it, you've got to go hither and thither through the news stream.
Most maddening about the iPad app, though, is that the list of features for the program described in the iTunes store don't jibe with what's delivered with the download. The actual app delivers app news, but app guides (which rank competing apps with similar functions), appisodes (a video recap of the latest app news), app movers (which lists up and coming apps) and others aren't to be found.
For browsers of app news and reviews, AppAdvice can be a satisfying experience, but for people who like their information delivered in a rational way and their apps to deliver what they say they're going to deliver in their App Store descriptions, it will be a very disappointing program.