Review: Urbanspoon iPhone/Touch restaurant app
Urbanspoon, the iPhone / Touch application, is aimed at the person that eats out with his or her iPhone, and with others. The app is aimed at enhancing your dining-out experience.
This is an app for the restaurant diner, and in these days of overwork and under-time, that means most of us. It will help its users find the right place to eat whether in their hometowns or on the road. It is a handy pocket companion that will help you to select the right restaurant for your mood, or if you are temporarily decision-impaired, will select one for you.
The app is free at the Apple App Store. It downloaded and installed on my iPhone flawlessly. After you have installed the app, it asks that you register. Registration makes possible a number of app features, and is quick and painless. After registration, the first screen that you see may seem a little confusing. It is called the “Shake” screen and is one of the most endearing features of the app.
It can also be selected by pressing “Shake” on the menu at the bottom of the screen. It presents you with what looks like a slot machine. In the left column is your location and other locations near you. In the center column are cuisine types. In the right column are price categories. If you just shake the phone, the slot reels turn and come to rest at the restaurant the app has chosen for you. The decision has been taken out of your hands and you can just go eat, preferably after you have previewed the selection made for you by pressing on the name of the restaurant on the display.
You can take part of the decision process back by using the lock symbols that are just below the reels. Using these, you can select a location, a cuisine type, or a price range (or any of the above) and then lock in that partial decision by pressing on the lock system in that column. So, if you select and lock in “Asian” on the center reel, the app will find you a random Asian restaurant in a location close to you. Lock in both your town and a moderate price range, the app will select a restaurant in a random cuisine in that location and price range. Go ahead, surprise yourself.
The next menu selection (“Friends”) will let you select the email address of a friend from your contact list, or will let you type in the address of any friend. Like other social networking sites, this will let you follow your friends, this time to their favorite restaurants. Especially of you trust your acquaintances’ restaurant tastes more than you do that of random members of the public, this is a useful feature and adds another dash of fun.
The “Browse” menu selection will help you find restaurants by their features, such as where they are, what types of food they serve, etc. You can look for places with free Wi-Fi, places that deliver, places with Vegan meals, restaurants in specific locations, and so on. If you know what you are looking for, this is the menu option that will help you find that one certain dining experience.
The next menu option lets you “Search” by entering your requirements into the app’s search engine. For example, in my area, I can type in “Lawrence” and get a list of restaurants in my home town or “hamburger” to find out what my choices are if that’s what I want to eat. This feature duplicates, to some degree, some other app functionality, but also will allow you to make a more specific request.
The last menu function, “Near Me” lists all of the restaurants around you by distance, closest first. This is handy if you don’t really care what you eat, but you want it right now! This option will also show you your available choices on a Google map, complete with the map tags to which we have all become accustomed. None of the usual Google map functions, such as pan and zoom, are available in this implementation, but this screen does show the tags on the map, each of which is defined in a list below the map itself for easy access.
The Urbanspoon app knows where you are, courtesy of the iPhone GPS function. Most of the screens will allow you to change your location by tapping on a “Location” icon at the top of the page. So you can also go restaurant-exploring in cities other than your own, handy for trip planning purposes.
Urbanspoon is a friendly and well-designed little app which fulfills a useful function for those of us that like to eat. It combines a restaurant search, social network, and recommendation engine into the tiny confines of your iPhone, allowing you to use it on the move. And if you are in information overload and can’t make a decision, Urbanspoon will even select the place where you will have your next meal.
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