As you may have read in yesterday’s post, I’ll be ranging through the cocktail apps available on the iPhone and evaluating which belong in your suite of apps and which are total duds to be left in the dustbin to be ported to Android³³ . As I mentioned, I will be evaluating the applications in 5 areas:

• Usability: Intuitive search functions? Screen go dark too quickly? Conversion options? This will tell you.
• Quality and Depth: Does its Mai Tai call for Creme de Noyaux? Is it chock-full of 20 “Sex on the Beach” variations? If so, fail.
• Features: Is it feature-rich with background information on drinks? Does it allow favorites and ratings to be stored/sorted. If so, it should fare well.
• Likability: Subjective, but important. If the app is fun to use or gorgeously-designed or is simply a pleasure to use, it will gain high marks here.
• Value: Charging me $1.99 for an advertisement-addled flaky piece of crap? Screw you, buddy! Giving me 2,000 recipes with quality photos and background information on the drinks from trusted sources for $3.99? Not bad! You get the idea.

All of these factors, at a weighting of my own choosing at that particular moment, will go into a final overall rating. Ultimately, I will round-up the “Best of the Best” that belong on anyone’s iPhone who is serious about cocktails and/or needs a handy reference behind the stick from time-to-time. Up now, iShot Machine:

iShot Machine
	Usability	iShot Machine starts up with music that had me ready to jump barrels being thrown by an angry gorilla that had just kidnapped my girlfriend. It then plops you immediately into “Shake It!” mode where one, presumably, should shake the iPhone to be handed a drink recipe. Scatter-shot, but easy peasy. It keeps the screen lit while shaking through recipes and browsing the search features, a feature I greatly appreciate. It also has several search functions that are fairly intuitive. One major irritation I had from a usability stand-point is that over half the screen’s footprint is committed to the “slot machine” component and the area to scroll through the index or a recipe was too small. This also makes scrolling difficult and I found myself accidentally selecting a recipe without meaning to because the controls are so tight. The instructions for using the app are easy to follow and a welcome touch.
Price: $.99	Quality/Depth:	By any respectable drinking standard, this thing is a mess. There are 7 variations on the “Gorilla Fart”33 and searching for “fart” graces the user with no fewer than 20 ill-begotten concoctions. I have a feeling 101 Cocktails or Cocktails+ will threaten to disable themselves permanently if you try such a stunt with them. Sure, there are something on the order of 3000+ drinks in the database and I’m sure there are some quality beverages buried somewhere, but abandon all hope ye who is assigned to find them. As for traditional and classic drinks that outline as my “baseline” drinks for measuring the quality of recipes in these applications, you’re kidding me, right?
	Features:	There are some thoughtful and well-designed features in this application including the ability to filter by spirit, mixer, or style (flamed, salted, etc.) and to share and view shared ratings. It also allows you to manage the app’s behavior in welcome ways, one of them being the ability to silence the dreadful 4-bit audio samples. The “Send” feature accesses your contact list so emailing recipes is only a few keypresses away; very well thought-out.
Producer: Oasys Mobile	Likability/Value:	This is app is approachable, but not very pretty, sort of like all those girls you practiced asking out in High School because you knew the likelihood of being rejected was very low33 . If it included traditional cocktail recipes on top of the gablillion shots it includes and pared down the number of shots and/or needless variations it lists, it would be a much-improved program. This is definitely trying to be a lifestyle application to give people who want to get inebriated quickly an ill-minded chance to abdicate their decision-making responsibilities to an application. Woe is to the bartender facing a crowd of people holding iPhones and bleating, “Make me *thithphbbt*!,” especially when one can’t clearly see the recipe in the first place.
	Overall:	Rating: At $.99, you’re getting what you pay for: no pictures, no frills, a little fun, some well-designed features (filtering, emailing recipes, staying lit), and some not-so-well-designed features (layout, dominance of “slot machine” components when viewing a recipe the “recipes” and others). I can’t recommend this to the folks I presume to be my readers as you’re, hopefully, looking for a higher-quality drinking experience in your life and not looking to scrape the bottom of the bibulous barrel with the dreck the vast majority of these drinks represent. Look elsewhere, please.

Read more on the iShot Machine app:

• An iShot Machine “infomercial”
• General overview and screen shots

Read cocktailnerd’s other iPhone Cocktail App Reviews:

• 101 Cocktails

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1. sorry guys, had to take a jab at you333
2. speaking of Donkey Kong333
3. ok, maybe that’s just me…liar333

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