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Awesome Facts ProPosted in Reference on 29 Mar 2009 |
 Reviewed by Steve Litchfield |
   (16 votes, average: 3.38 out of 5)  Loading ... |
Editor’s rating:  
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Ultimately, of course, there’s very little that’s unique about a collection of textual facts – as can be seen from the other ‘Facts’ applications in the iPhone App Store, many of which share the same font and (in some cases) the same facts. But Awesome Facts Pro was the first, is (arguably) the slickest, the most downloaded and has a delightfully obvious interface, which for me, at a dollar, makes it definitely the one to go for.
At its simplest, Awesome Facts Pro pops up a new fun/useless/interesting ‘fact’ every time you tap the panel or shake your iPhone (or iPod Touch), but there’s subtlety here that you might not have expected. First and foremost, there’s a ‘Categories’ list – in addition to seeing stats about the number of facts in each category and how many you’ve seen (”gulp, not even 10% through, I feel like running away screaming – my brain cannae’ take it!”), it’s easy to tick those for which you do want facts to randomly appear and remove the tick for those you want to avoid. Not an iPhone-standard interface element, but intuitive nevertheless.
The nice touches continue. If you move past a random fact too quickly and immediately wish you’d read it properly, there’s a ‘Back’ icon to let you do just that. You can email a particularly interesting fact to a friend (though the actual email sending is done using the iPhone OS Mail client, which in a non-multitasking iPhone world means that Awesome Facts Pro has to be closed down and restarted). And a ‘Favorites’ system lets you keep your own little database of nuggets that you’d like to regurgitate down the pub to amaze your friends.
A final mark of quality is the way Awesome Facts Pro is regularly updated, with new facts (we’re currently up to over 4000) and improvements to the interface. Yes, this may be one of the most trivial applications in the App Store, but it’s very well done and is guaranteed to go down a storm in many an informal social situation.
