The Good
- Extensive customization options
- Allows you to add text and clip art to wallpapers
- Includes shelves and app skins
The Bad
- Way too much choice to be useful
- Seems to require downloads to view almost anything
- Slow
The Price
$0.99
Contrary to what many people—including some app developers, unfortunately—seem to think, more is not always better. Choice is good, vital in fact. But even though choice is good, more choice isn’t necessarily better. Too much choice can be overwhelming, so overwhelming that it prevents you from acting; an abundance of choices can become almost like no choice at all.
That’s the case with iCandy Shelves & Skins, an app designed to help you create and customize wallpaper for your iPhone or iPod touch. Its overwhelming number of choices and options, combined with its slowness, make it a frustrating app.
Too Slow, Too Web-Based
You get an inkling of what’s to come the first time you launch iCandy Shelves & Skins. Instead of going right to the app, you’re greeted by a splash screen that explains that the app doesn’t come with much content pre-loaded, but instead downloads it in the background as you view it. Expect using the app to be slow the first few times as the downloads happen, it warns. It turns out to be an accurate warning: I spent a lot of time looking at “please wait” messages on the screen as I waited for images I’d tapped on to appear. Why this is the situation, though, I can’t understand. iCandy Shelves & Skins offers both its own collection of images and those drawn from the web. Why not pre-load all the images from its collection and just download those from the web when they’re tapped on? Even if the app was a bigger download, wouldn’t that make using it faster?
To make the downloading situation even more frustrating, the first set of download delays isn’t the only one you’ll encounter. First, you’ll need to wait for the app to download small previews of the wallpapers to choose from. When you do tap on one, though, don’t expect to see the full-size image right away. Instead, you’ll get another thumbnail (though this one a bit bigger) and another message saying that the full-size image is being downloaded. You’ll be glad you waited for the full size, as it looks much better than the thumbnail (no surprise, of course), but the many times you have to wait for downloads only underscores the frustration that this approach creates.
Regardless, keep in mind when you use this app that the faster your Internet connection, the better your experience with it will be. And, if you’re on an iPhone, you may want to use it on Wi-Fi, not 3G, since so much downloading could eat up your monthly data plan.
Extensive Customization Options
Once you’ve selected the wallpaper that you may want to use and downloaded it, things get interesting. Besides just using the wallpaper itself, you can crop and rotate it, add shelves that apps appear to sit on or skins that surround the app icons to give them a different look, surround it with a picture frame, or even add text to it.
The ability to add text really caught my eye. Again, I was greeted with a “please wait” message as the feature loaded, but once it did, I was able to add text, choose a font from among dozens of good options, justify it, change its color, and even add clip art symbols to it. Here again, though, things got overwhelming. A few clip art symbols seems nice, but there were hundreds to choose from spread across many screens. What’s the point of that? How often will most of those symbols be used? Why not pare things down to a leaner, easier-to-use set of the top 25 or 50?
I again asked the question “why?” when I found that iCandy Shelves & Skins allows users to create animations. That would be a great feature if you were able to use those animations as wallpapers or lock screens on your iPhone, but you’re not; the iOS doesn’t support that. Instead, the app suggests that you’ll want to create these to use as credit sequences in iMovie or to send to your friends via email or SMS. I suppose this is possible, but why add these features to an app designed to help you customize your iPhone wallpaper? It just doesn’t seem that related—and I’d wager that there are other apps out there that, since they’re designed specifically for that purpose, can do a better job. This just seems like a case of adding a feature to be able to say “look what else we can offer” without truly having a good justification for it.
The Bottom Line
When creating or using an app, it’s important remember one thing: more is not necessarily better. In fact, more is almost never better. Better is better. And to be better, you have to make difficult choices and adhere to a specific vision.
Apple has proved this principle again and again in the way it designs its interfaces, what it chooses to include and exclude from apps, its tightly curated selection of choices in its retail stores. Making hard choices about what to exclude is what leads to great products, not offering every last thing you can think of.
And that’s the fundamental problem with iCandy Shelves & Skins. It’s just got too much in it. Too many options, too many choices, too many features. It doesn’t feel like a bounty; it feels overwhelming.
The basics of a good app are present in iCandy Shelves & Skins. To realize them, though, the developers will need to narrow its focus, reduce its options, and improve its speed.
What You’ll Need
An iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad running iOS 4.0 or higher.
