Software: Tea Notes (iPhone)

Thursday is Teahouse/Tea Room, Accessory and Brand Review Day!

This application is the sibling application of “Tasting Notes”. But in the case of “Tea Tasting Notes” from App Shop, LLC… I’m seriously disappointed.

“Tea Tasting Notes” or “Tea Notes” as the icon labels itself on my iPhone, is an attempt to grow beyond the parent application reviewed last week here on Tea-Guy. This app however, only tackles tea. It expands on what the parent app has and tries to answer all of my issues from it’s parent. What we all hope for from our children.

I absolutely love the way this application attempts expands itself from a weak solution to something more robust, allowing you to select and expand the field listings and even add more star ratings into the mix.

Press the edit button at the top and this application provides a very simple method to allowing you to expand on its existing options. You can easily expand using template designs, or create your own new fields. While you can’t unfortunately reorganize existing sections… you can at least add new sections with their own fields into the mix. Rather than rehashing last week’s review and again explaining why I feel the way I do about customizability… you could read it.

Diving into the editing capabilities of this app, I have to say, virtually all of my complaints were easily mastered. You can create your own fields and specify what kind of data the field should represent. You can even create more star rating objects, very handy for me when considering my differentiation is handling the review of flavor, aroma and boldness as separate scales.

“Well…” you ask… “What’s the problem then? Why do you dislike the application? Why did you give it a 1/5?”

Let me tell you… for all the bonuses this application gets for tacking most of my quibbles… for all it does to advance interface wise and to expand it’s customizability… it sucks because it’s buggier than a termite infestation!

After creating the first review with this application… my main notes screen wigged out on me and appeared as the above. I tried exiting the app, it didn’t help. I tried reinstalling the app, that didn’t help either. I also tried adding more reviews to see if that’d kick it into gear. No go.

On top of that… the app crashes when trying to email a review to someone. And when taking photos for the reviews, the app reports that it cannot add the photo as it couldn’t save it. This while I had no issues with any other apps on my iPhone including Twitter apps, the iPhone camera app and even a silly mustache novelty application.

What’s most disappointing is that it comes so close to getting everything right… and then it let’s bugs in where everything matters.

Pros

• Can create custom fields for just about anything
• Can add extra star ratings fields
• Can record tea notes

Cons

• WOW is it bug-tastic!
• Extremely tap happy interface
• Can’t take photos any longer
• Can’t send emails any longer
• Parts of the interface are quirky (adding a new note, recording a web address into a note)

In fact, the three dollar ($2.99) app is so bad, it can’t even be found on the App Store any longer. How’s that for confidence? I hope the developer is working on improving the reliability of this application for re-posting. I can really see it being a 4/5 if it weren’t so bug friendly.