Chewy Apps

Blinders on a horse keep distractions at bay and help the horse to focus on the direction of movement. Blinders on an app developer, however, aren’t such a good idea.

As an app developer, I want to monitor many sources of information that’ll help me as a developer. Staying hunkered down in my home office as I pound out code might get me some success. If I know what’s going on in the iPhone world around me, however, I’ll be able to direct my energies better. That’ll probably lead to more success. I subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds by both other iPhone developers and also by iPhone news sites. I like to know what developers are thinking, and I like to know what users are thinking. Plus the coding tips I get from developers are great. One of my favourite developer blogs is iPhone Development.

There was a hole in my vision, though, that I only recently filled. Even though I subscribed to news sites, I still wasn’t getting a taste for the apps out there. I used the apps I had, and only rarely did I find new ones. This had to change. So I got myself an iPhone app called Chomp. It puts a set of apps in front of your face to review, and you can review, ignore them, or dismiss them forever (among other things). While I do review apps every once in a while, I mainly use this app just to see what’s out there. I quickly look at each app and usually I dismiss it forever. Sometimes I bookmark it and sometime I get it. It’s nice that the app has a feature to get the app right then. I’ve found several apps I like using Chomp, and when I get a spare minute or two in the day, I often boot up Chomp and go through a couple dozen apps quickly. The Chomp interface is good for that. While Chomp does allow you to select a category of apps to review, I also wish I could select a category of apps not to review. I’d like to be able to look at all app types except games. I don’t really care about iPhone games.