Reviews @ Techinch

For years now, I’ve reviewed apps for a living, saving my mini-tutorials, tips and tricks, opinion pieces on tech and life, and more for Techinch.com. There’s been the occasional review from time to time, but they’ve been rather rare over the past year or so.

That’s changing. Now that AppStorm’s closing down, and my day job has been refocused to app training at Tuts+ — something you’ll see shared here too, soon — I want to continue reviewing the apps I love and use, and Techinch is the natural place to keep that going. So now, there’s a brand new Reviews section that’ll list each of my new app reviews, along with a new Kirby-powered review system that’ll include a quick rating and app info section at the end of each review. You’ll see a colored review bar (only one, of course, per app) followed by the app info, as seen below:

And, you’ll be able to spot Review articles from the main blog easily, since their titles will include a ∴ sign in front of them. Link articles already include an → before their title, to indicate that they link to another site, and reviews now include a ∴ since they include a conclusion telling you whether or not you should buy the app. Perhaps the icon isn’t perfect, but I thought it fit, and I wanted some way to set aside app reviews from the rest of the articles here.

Along with that, I’ve made a few long-needed code changes to make Techinch.com fully responsive, so it should look great everywhere. Let me know if you notice anything broken.

What to Expect from Techinch Reviews

A good review is far more than a shiny summary box, though. And if it only tells you that you can install the app and that it has all the features you’d expect and blah, blah, blah…, you’d fall asleep.

Here’s what you will find, though. Reviews at Techinch will tell you what’s great about an app, what problems it’ll solve in your life, and what (if any) issues you can expect from the app. You can expect geeky details like the fonts the app uses, and Applescript or x-callback-url features it has, and deep details on how the app works. Think AnandTech’s hardware reviews, except about apps. There will be none of the stuff you already should know about the app, and all of the stuff you’re curious about the app. It’ll be the detailed analysis you need to decide if you can really use the app in your workflow, along with full-sized clear screenshots of the app in action so you can see how it really works.

Then, there will be no number ratings on Techinch — the metadata in the reviews doesn’t even have a number — but there’s still a ranking system. Here’s how that breaks down:

• INSANELY GREAT (green): Apps that do everything they’ve promised, and more, in such a great/new/innovative way that you can’t help but be impressed. These are the kind of apps you’ll want to run, not walk, to the App Store and download.
• GOOD (yellow): Apps that do what they’ve promised, and get the job done. They won’t blow your socks off, and aren’t game changing, but they’re solid apps that fit the bill.
• OK (grey): Apps that are usable for some tasks, but they’re buggy, don’t meet their marketing hype, and are far from amazing. They’re just ok. If you really need what this app does, go ahead and buy it — but if you’re looking for something amazing, keep looking.
• BAD (red): Apps that I can’t recommend you buy. They’re not good, and there’s better alternates out there. Expect to see this rating very rarely on Techinch — I’d rather write about apps I love than complain about stuff I hate — but it’s there just in case I want to use it.

Throw in the app icon and name linked to its App Store page or website, combined with a quick description of the app, the platform(s) it supports, and its price, and that’s it. It’ll hopefully be the info you need to decide whether or not to buy an app. There will be the facts you need about the app, along with my opinion on the app honed by years of testing and reviewing apps. I hope you’ll like it.

For now, comments will still be only on Twitter and App.net, but I’d love your feedback on that as well. If there’s a demand for it, I’d consider adding Disqus comments to review pages to make them more comprehensive. So if you want that, @reply me on Twitter and let me know.

A Quick Word on Kirby

I really wanted to start writing more reviews on Techinch the second AppStorm’s shutdown was announced. And yet, I wanted to make the reviews as nice as possible, and had the idea for a new real-English ratings system along with the more-standard app description box. That took a bit longer to flesh out, though, which is why this post is being published halfway through January.

I think the effort was worth it, though. Essentially, all review posts now include extra Markdown fields that Kirby CMS makes incredibly easy to extract and use in the article and in other pages (thus, the new Reviews page that’ll show every review listed with its respective app icon). WordPress always overwhelmed me, but with Kirby, I can develop practically anything for my site even with my limited PHP skills. And that’s rather cool.

And the best part is, since all new review articles will include the extra metadata, there’s more I can do with that in the future if I have more coding and design time — including perhaps adding a quick review summary box at the very top of the article, something I considered adding but cut for time’s sake this time.

*****

So there you have it — a quick dive into the new Reviews @ Techinch. There’s no new-style reviews just yet, but expect to see them coming in over the coming days and weeks.

And as always, thank you so much for reading Techinch and being a part of the community. I really appreciate it.

Thoughts? @reply me on Twitter.