Hi everyone,
I'm Quentin, the guy behind @placeboardapp. It's a new iPhone app ($4.99) that makes it really easy to organize restaurants, shops, natural sites, and many other places you stumble upon in your daily life or while travelling.
Unlike most other similar apps or social networks, it's designed as a personal bookmarking experience (with tags, notes, rating etc.), where sharing is entirely optional. It's your own private place database!
Any places can be shared quickly by SMS, Email, Twitter, Facebook. Another option is to create a share list where you can invite friends to contribute. Share lists use a collaborative editing model similar to Google Docs, in the sense, two persons can edit the same place and the app will combine their changes.
I had two goals when creating the app:
- a great user experience, that looks much simpler than existing apps while still providing a lot of flexibility
- a big focus on privacy, among other things this means, your places are stored locally, share lists are encrypted and no account is required (until you create a share list)
A lot of time was spent polishing user experience details like:
- finding places around you within a given distance
- picking tags applied to a place
- hiding already used colors when creating a new tag
- eliminating confirmation dialogs
- powerful undo/redo abilities
- etc.
If you have any questions, just let me know!
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@quentin_mathe@placeboardapp Clean UX (but nothing very attractive in terms of UI design) and I hope it will be better with PH comments and user feedbacks. As far as I can say, it does the job but $4.99 price tag is expensive for this kind of utility app with few screens.
@tolgaarican Hi, thanks for pointing out the clean UX. I'm really looking for feedback to improve it, so I appreciate your comment. I have many more ideas I'd like try in the future such as automatically tagging places, suggesting places to the user based on his habits, a more attractive home screen and place editor, a better way to discover nearby places, wikipedia integration etc.
I was lucky enough to have early access to Placeboard, it's an impressive app! You can read my review over at App Recap - http://apprecap.net/placeboard-y...
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I am a heavy Swarm/Foursquare user. Should I switch? Why?
@ispekhov If you want to discover locations suggested by people around the world, check what others think about a place or if you enjoy the fun factor of Swarm, you should surely stick to Foursquare.
If you don't like social networks, want a simpler and uncluttered UI, a more personal experience where you can organize the places you discover in your own way, while still having access to powerful sharing abilities, you should switch to Placeboard :)
Placeboard is entirely designed as your own private place database. You don't need an account to use it, you won't see other people ratings, suggestions or comments, and by default they won't have access to your saved places.
There are various other differences too. For example… Your place database is saved directly on your iPhone and not on a server, so Placeboard still works when there is no network. This also means Placeboard is really fast, you won't see loading spinners unlike with Foursquare.
Foursquare place database is also not as rich as Apple place database, so Placeboard tends to provide more results than Foursquare.
As a final note, to be honest there is no way to import your favorite places from Foursquare or Yelp currently, so switching might be harder for some users. Importing places from other apps is a feature I'd like to tackle soon though.
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