Fleishman G. Five-Star Apps: The Best iPhone and iPad Apps for Work and Play

Peachpit Press, 2011. — 222 p.What makes a five-star app? A program has to be interesting, even if the task it’s performing is routine. When you look at a dozen apps that have the same informational, utilitarian, or entertainment goal, five-star apps have that extra something special that floats to the top.
In reading thousands of recommendations, testing hundreds of apps, and then choosing the set that appears in this book, I found that the best apps were ones that surprised me and charmed me, even for ordinary tasks.
A good example is Ocarina, an early iPhone app that continues to be a bestseller more than two years after the introduction of the App Store.
Anyone could have come up with a pedestrian ocarina program, in which you blow into the microphone to simulate breath going into the ancient musical instrument with onscreen buttons controlling finger positions.
What Ge Wang and his Smule team brought to Ocarina was depth, discovery, charm, and a community. The more you use Ocarina, the better you can become at it. Dig at the program and you can set a different key or musical mode. Tap a global icon and see—and hear!—other people playing the program worldwide. Go online and find transcribed scores in Ocarina notation to play yourself.
It’s not just an app; it’s a small universe. Not every app is Ocarina, but every program in this book has some combination of stellar qualities: a high degree of finish (interface, graphics, and program action), utility (at a task, at having fun, at facilitating creativity or learning), and persistence.
That last point is a key one. For five-star apps, the developer keeps tweaking and updating the program to add more features and fix things that aren’t right, He or she tries to bring to the app more of what existing users want, and what might make the program more appealing to new users.
The other aspect of my personal fivestar apps is that they rarely average more than
3. to 4 stars on Apple’s App Store rating system. That struck me as odd when I started researching the book. Fabulous programs—universally well reviewed by magazines and Web sites, with great word of mouth, and which tested well for me—had a lot of meh in the reviews.
That’s partly the vagary of reviewers and partly an outcome of Apple’s review system. Five stars may seem like too many; three or four fairer. And, before iOS 4, Apple asked for ratings whenever an app was deleted, hardly a great time to get an opinion. It was also easy to mistap and rate an app with a single star. Reviewers also complain after purchase about the cost of apps. I used quality, not price, as a factor in picking app.
For this book, five stars are what I give all the apps in it using my own personal rating system. I hope you’ll agree—and tell me about your own five-star apps.Reading
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