zummerZummer is an application which resides under the ‘Lifestyle’ category in Apple’s App Store. This aesthetically pleasing application is a great way to get talking to people with similar interests as yourself. OmniTyke Ltd (developers) have allowed its users to share, by way of images, interesting things that they find in daily life. In addition to this users can contribute to topics by commenting something relevant to photos already uploaded. Each photo should be assigned to a specific category so that conversations can be started and other photos related to it can be uploaded after it. The most featured topics are presented to you upon launching this application. A topic of the day is picked by the amount of photos and comments posted to a certain topic everyday. For example at the time of writing this review the London 2012 Olympics are taking place, consequently this has been the topic of the day for about a week now.

 

Pros:

Zummer has an interface which is closely related to that of the more social affiliated application, Path. It utilizes Apple’s great multitouch gestures with positive integration and adds a sense of cohesion and fluidity to the UI (User Interface). We have discovered that it has a very ‘topically’ focused UI, which means that around 95%+ of the UI relates to the content submitted by the user in the specific topic categories. The UI compliments the content submitted to this application so much that upon use it just fades away and you’re forced to focus on the content and not the UI. The UI – it is aesthetically pleasing to the eye and highly functional at the same time.

This application is also closely related to Instagram. Due to the fact that interesting, modern filters can be added to the photos you upload to create a sense of uniqueness to your photos to benefit the viewing pleasure of others. We feel that the developer has purposely looted inspiration from Instagram to ensure that the images uploaded to Zummer can have emphasis put on them upon the users consent, not copied it. These two applications are actually quite different. The anonymity of Instagram is definitely not portrayed in Zummer, we feel that it is a more publicized, topic focused version of Instagram and that different types of people of different age groups will use it.

Zummer makes it easy to not only follow topics in which interest you, but it allows you to communicate with people who support the same interests. It is a great, free, way to communicate with people who know, understand and appreciate the words and images that you express – whereas your close friends and family may not have the same level of interest and appreciation for a specific topic as you do.

Push notifications are included and can be toggled on/off by navigating to the settings App on your iOS device. There is also the implementation of using your current location. This feature is put into practice so that users can seek for topics in and around their vicinity. The inclusion of social media can be used extensively or not used at all as you’re given the option to sign in with Social media sites like Facebook. In addition to this, your interests can be portrayed on Facebook, for example when you follow a topic, your friends can be notified by way of viewing your timeline.

There are a multitude of categories available in this application, 31 to be exact. So you will not have to worry about there not being a category to suit your needs as each of these categories creates a versatile sense to OmniTykes frequently updated application. These categories range from ‘Nature’ to ‘Travel’ – so you can see that the developer had tried to cater for a large target market to maximize downloads.

 

Cons:

We get the immediate impression from the developers actions that they want as many different people to get involved with this application – so therefore the lack of cross platform support surprises us. We feel that different people would get involved with this application if it was developed onto a cross platform, due to the fact that Apple don’t have 100% of the mobile device market share and there are quite a significant amount of people using alternative mobile operating systems like Google Android.

That appears to be the only negative point so far.

 

Verdict:

Overall, this application has been very well and professionally developed by OmniTyke and we can see from overlooking past versions of this application that the updates have been significant and the developer has put further effort towards the well being of their application. In addition to this we love how focused this application is on whole. We especially love the aesthetics and function of the UI as it has clearly been well thought out by the developer. There are more than a few categories for you to choose from so you’ll never get lost or lonely when using this application. Despite this there are a few trade off’s in which should’t put you off downloading this application but should be taken into account when doing so. The lack of cross platform support restricts a larger quantity of conversation on the application. The irrelevant name may not be good for the marketing of the application and also this application may not be approved by some users due to the strong relation of connecting with strangers.

 

 
You can get the App for free from here.
TheAppleGoogle Rating: 9/10