Last week we gave ...
Local search app Poynt comes to Android
Poynt, a local search app in the vein of Yelp, which until today was available for iPhone and Blackberry users, has launched its Android app.
We don’t have any experience with the Blackberry app, so we’re just going to talk about the Android app released today and the recently updated iPhone app. First of all, both the iPhone and Android apps are nice looking (the screenshot above is from the iPhone app), that shows a fun 3D feature dialer when the app launches. When you launch the app, it automatically turns on your GPS (if it wasn’t already on) and asks you “Where can we Poynt you today?” (get it?) with the 3D dialer below showing businesses, restaurants, gas stations (Android only), movies, and somewhat surprisingly – people search
Restaurant search brings in listings from SuperPages, OpenTable and CitySearch (no Yelp), but otherwise is pretty standard. Really, most of the app offers standard local search features, with perhaps the exception being the people search, which is basically an integrated white pages feature that includes reverse lookup by phone and address as well as by name. Of course, there are dedicated white pages apps for this, but it’s a little unusual to see this integrated into a local search app.
Right now at least, Poynt doesn’t seem to interested in letting users add new data such as reviews, comments, or check-ins, instead opting to just be an aggregator. Without those increasingly standard features, Poynt right now is basically just a well laid out local search app, without much add on or niche value – i.e. the app needs more direction. That said, it’s a solid start design wise and we’ll keep an eye on it to see how it progresses across mobile platforms.
You can download the free Android app through the Android Market.
Yesterday I came across this pro theme builders: http://quommunication.com/ they got a great news and video theme, (sounds like spam I know, but its true, honestly!)
I agree that a lot of the early sites using the Thesis Theme looked very similar. But that didn’t stop me from buying it and using it. There were just too many things to like about the framework, and it has gotten better. The last release, version 1.1, added more options that should lead to further customizations by bloggers, so that sites don’t all have that “Thesis look”. I have some screen shots of the new options pages that are available in the WordPress Admin interface here:
http://www.thesistheme.org/what-are-my-options/
Now that it is easier to change the column layout, fonts, font sizes, and such I think we should start to see more variety in the use of Thesis.