I don’t feel very happy about this review; you see I got this app only because of the glowing reviews that it had gotten. I love Jazz, and wanted to really like this app…
I spent nearly $10.00 on the Jazz History app for the iPad… This same information (scant as it is) could easily fit into about one to two pages of a free website… The associated videos are all from YouTube, and even the internal links to iTunes are only to buy cuts or whole albums smacks a bit too much of why Apple has been pushing this unlikely cash cow. It’s too bad, in that I can see that there is a small but real market out there for those who want to get a more comprehensive overview of what Jazz is and how it developed.
As with Ken Burn’s PBS extravaganza about Jazz (several years ago) this app also suffers from selective myopia, in that some artists are incredibly underrepresented, while a few others are covered (for what can only be assumed to be obscure reasons). Maybe it’s just that with a topic as broad in content and so deep in history that any presentation would have to be enormous to be of any real value.
This app is quite the opposite in that other than some reasonably smart graphics and other forms of eye candy, the underlying content is pretty sparse, and excepting for the iTunes connection (retail product connection$$$) I haven’t found any reasonable links to more information.
So, on a scale of one to ten, and taking the fact that this app retails for nearly $10.00, I find it hard to give it more than…let’s say…a two.
Behind one of the best designed iPad apps: History of Jazz
http://scobleizer.com/2011/01/18/behind-one-of-the-best-designed-ipad-apps-history-of-jazz
