The Online Magazine Focused on App Design, Branding & Marketing

The App: Video Time Machine

The Device: iPhone

The Price: $2.99

The Basics: The internet is the world’s library and YouTube is the world’s video archive. Everything you ever need to know or want to know is out there somewhere, just one proper Google search away. Still, the internet and YouTube exist as one big pile of information. Uncategorized, it sits there in a big lump of raw data with limited organization. Video Time Machine is an app with a pretty major goal: cultivate a library of thousands of videos, organize them by category and year and let your browse. Want to watch movies trailers from 1951? How about commercials from 1964? Sporting events from 1933? You can watch videos from 2011 or from 1898. It’s impressive.

The Review: Video Time Machine delivers on what it promises. Its incredibly simple layout and design ensures that there is absolutely no learning curve. Once you’ve opened the app, you already know how to use it.

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(Every week, Rocksauce Studios CEO Q Manning will answer your questions about app design, app development and the mobile industry.)

What do you think about integrating phones with game systems and televisions, particularly with technology like Microsoft’s Smart Glass?

Integration with television and apps has already started to happen. Apple has Air Play, which allows you go go right from your iPad to your Apple TV, so you can play Angry Birds on your television, which is kind of awesome. We’ve also seen some of this with Nintendo’s Wii U, where this kind of technology will be allowing you to get information about the game as you play it. In a game of Madden football, you’ll be able to see your plays on your tablet instead of the typical set-up, where you see and select your plays on the screen. As far as games being on both, it shows how mobile games are going to become more and more prevalent.

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The App: Bejeweled

The Device: iPhone

The Price: $0.99

Why We Love It: There’s a reason why Bejeweled has been downloaded 500 million times since the game’s initial creation in 2001. It’s one of the most addicting puzzle games ever made, a game that can be played anytime, anywhere. It’s the kind of game that can be played for thirty seconds or for an hour. It’s pretty much the perfect game for smartphones.

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The App: Netflix

The Device: iPhone/HTC Incredible

The Price: The app is free, but a subscription will cost you

The Basics: Surely you know about Netflix. In fact…surely you use Netflix. After all, it is the year 2012 and you know how to use the internet. What was once a rent-DVDs-through-the-mail service has evolved into a digital streaming service, with an impressive selection of ready-to-watch movies and television shows. Since you could now watch movies through an internet connection with no need for a disc, a mobile app was inevitable. I’ve used the Netflix app on both Android and iPhone and both versions are just about identical…but is that identical experience good or bad?

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(Every Tuesday, Kyle St. Romain will talk about the business and legal side of the app world. While his opinions don’t always reflect those of Rocksauce Studios, you should hear him out…the guy knows his stuff!)

Apparently I’m not the only one who likes to use the phrase “Troll Toll.” Apart from the obvious (*cough* ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’), I’ve found another writer who recently used the phrase to discuss AT&T, net neutrality, and why those two terms shouldn’t go together. What’s unfortunate about the prevalence of this phrase is how pervasive these greedy little trolls are collecting tolls.

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Plague Inc.: Have you ever wanted to wipe out the entire planet in about a half hour of gameplay? Then Plague Inc. is for you! The game puts you in control of a deadly disease, which you must carefully manipulate to infect the entire world. You don’t have direct control of your disease, but you do select where the plague starts and use your carefully earned points to modify infectivity, lethality and symptoms. You have to take note of how the rest of the world is reacting to your disease and mutate accordingly, trying to find a way to overcome any safety measures being put against you. It’s pretty grim subject matter, but it’s incredibly addicting and requires some surprisingly intense and thoughtful strategy. Destroying the world on your iPhone has never been this much fun.

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Before I became a UX designer at Rocksauce Studios, I literally lived and worked all over the world. I was born in Singapore, but I moved to Beijing, China when I was two. I was there for about 15 years, but then I moved to Savannah, GA to attend the Savannah College of Art and Design. Although I’ve spent most of my time since then living and working in the United States, I spent two of those years working in Singapore.

If you want to run a successful company, you’re probably going to have to deal with clients and customers from other countries. Business is global and while learning how to work on such a large stage can be bumpy, it’s not as difficult as you probably think it is!

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A lot of people talk about the idea of starting their own business, whether that is a mobile app or a manufacturing company. I say go for it. I love the enthusiasm and vigor entrepreneurs bring to the conversation. However, many people enter into new ventures without any formal business structure. Lawyer 101 says to get everything in writing and have all interested parties sign it, especially when it comes to a new business. I’m sure the Winklevoss twins and that other guy whose name is hardly worth remembering still cry at night thinking about what they could have done differently.

So you have a new idea, you have a team together, and you’re going to make a killer app that gets you rich or you’ll die tryin’. Stop! Before you go any further, you want to get organized: who is doing what, how much everyone contributed, and how much they get. The easiest way to do this is to organize a business entity, which can come in the form of a Limited Liability Company (LLC), Corporation (either C or S-Corp), Partnership (limited or general), or, if you’re going at it alone, a simple sole proprietorship may work just fine. For my money, I vote LLC and here’s why:

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(Talksauce is the Friday editorial where Tapsauce editor-in-chief Jacob Hall talks about something that’s on his mind. His brutally honest opinions don’t represent the views of Rocksauce Studios, but hopefully they’ll give you some food for thought!)

Earlier this week, I briefly wrote about an app called I’d Cap That, a comedy application for the iPhone that placed random hilarious/vulgar captions under the pictures you took with your phone. As far as apps made for 15 year old boys and people with the sense of humor of 15 year old boys (like yours truly) go, it’s a ton of fun and was rightfully dominating the top of the charts in the app store. After playing with it on a friend’s iPhone, I grabbed my Droid to see it was available across the aisle.

It wasn’t, but someone wanted very hard for me to think it was. The top search result was an app called Piccap, but in parenthesis next to the title was “I’d Cap That.” Not only was this a blatant rip-off of I’d Cap That, it had the audacity to use the original app’s title as some kind of sub-headline to ensure it got the downloads from people searching for the version only available on iPhone. At the risk of being hyperbolic, the people behind Piccap deserve a nice hard slap to the face and Google deserves an equally hard slap for letting that slide.

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The App: Quipper

The Device: HTC Incredible (Android)

The Price: Free

The Basics: Quipper is an app built for two different perspectives: those who want to learn and those who enjoy a good round of trivia. The app consists entirely of user-created quizzes, with subjects ranging from the Renaissance to 1970s television. Quipper can function as a study-aid , letting you research a subject or create a custom quiz of questions you need to study (and which can then be used by everyone else also studying the subject) or it can be a wonderful time-waster/road trip tool, where you pick a subject and see just how much you know (because there’s nothing sweeter than proving to your girlfriend that you know the name of Richie Cunningham’s older brother).

The Examination: Conceptually, I’m deeply in love with Quipper. I don’t think it’s where it needs to be quite yet, but with some updates and technical massages, I think it has the potential to become a truly essential app. I’m certainly not alone in thinking this, since the app recently raised a boatload of funding. Right now, Quipper feels like the first draft of something truly great.

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