Coming Soon

So earlier this week we let you know that Yellow.co.nz was going to release an App for your iPhone. Well, they have been kind enough to give us a copy a few days early so we can put it through it’s paces. Hit the read more link to see if it’s going to give Zenbu or Find NZ! a run for their money (even though they are all free, ah you get what I mean!)

When we first saw the video for this we were excited yet sceptical about how good it would really be. If you’ve ever used Yellow.co.nz from your desktop/laptop you’ll know what I mean, the website isn’t the best in terms of usability, but we opened our minds and hoped and preyed this would be different.

First up the good…The UI for this app is really nice. Yes, there are some small kinks that need to be worked out (some wrapping issues on the address field) but generally I really like it. It’s nice and easy to navigate and some good sized menu buttons make it easy to use. You can specify a location as below or use your current location using GPS.

Yellow Search

If your search doesn’t yield any results you are presented with a screen to automatically dial 018, be careful as you will be charged for the call if you hit the big green button. A useful feature built in making life that little bit easier.

Call 018 (careful you'll be charged)

Once you’ve searched and found what you’re looking for you can easily add it to your favourites from the results view. Or if you get a number of results you can map them all to see which is closer.

At times I found this to be buggy. Every now and then when pressing the map or more info button it would crash out of the app. I tried the usual reboot to make sure the memory wasn’t full but to no avail. Hopefully this is just a small bug that will be ironed out in the first update. The Favourites has a number of popular search terms pre-programmed for a speedy search, such as restaurants, cafes etc.

Call, email, directions and info

From the screen above you can call the selected business, email them, get directions via google maps from your current location or choose to get more info on the selected company. The image of the map can either be map or hybrid, but has no street view.

Under the more info tab you get, well, more info, phone numbers, address, hours of operation, extended description etc etc. One thing I did note, when you call someone by pressing the green button on the main screen or map or by pressing the number it automatically dials instead of bringing up a confirmation dialogue as per the image below (taken from google app).

are you sure you want to do that?

Also when you hit the website link it takes you out of the app and into Safari – not a major biggie, but my preference would be that it opens the webpage within the app so I can go straight back to where I was.

So that’s the good taken care of now for some bad points and the first….the search functionality. It is just as bad as the website it’s based off, in fact I would go so far as to say it’s worse.

The first thing I did was search for a listing that is in the Yellow Pages – simple enough, right? No, the listing didn’t come up. Ok maybe they are not listed online, so I checked and yes there they were. So I thought maybe it could be that the app doesn’t have the full listings yet, but the information is pulled down from the web servers so it should be there.

Next up I searched for Ballantynes, but instead of searching for the full string I thought I would see how it handled part names and typed in Ballan. Now to me, in this day and age, if you search for a part word it should be able to find it. Again, it couldn’t, not a good start. (fyi searching for Ballatynes does bring it up and searching for part company names will also bring it up, i.e “switched on” will bring up listings for ’switched on gardener’ etc)

Ok third test, lets search for ‘Electrical Supplies’ (a Christchurch company). Now what do you see wrong with the picture below?

4th Place....

4th Place! Now if I were Electrical Supplies Ltd I wouldn’t be too pleased about this, and just for the record, there were others that had similar results to this (try ‘Asko’).

Test number 4…the competition, I wanted to see how it faired against Zenbu/Find! NZ. I wanted the 0800 number for AMI Insurance so first I went to Zenbu typed my search ‘AMI’ and up come the results it listed all my local (and not so local) listings for AMI, but not one of them had the 0800 number listed I wanted. Switch to Yellow, type the same search and the first result comes up with AMI Insurance, click on it and voila, one 0800 number (which I dialled straight from the app. (round 4 to Yellow)

Now this isn’t to say it is better than Zenbu/Find! NZ but more of a backup or secondary alternative. Each have their pros and cons. i.e the Yellow database is updated dynamically whereas Zenbu is updated through updates. One is good for off line, using no data, and the other is good to make sure you have the most up to date listings. Which do I prefer, both…I am going to sit on the fence on this one as I think there is a need for both. I would really like to see Yellow app have an option where you can view data locally and update when you want/if you want. However the database for Yellow is huge so this may not be viable.

UPDATE: In response to the review the developers have given some good news about the bugs..”A few of the issues you raised as bugs in the review are actually the result of running the pre-release build of 3.1. On 3.0.x, there are (as far as we know) no bugs, and we will push an update when the app is approved to ensure that the app remains bug free”. Tis is great that the development team are on the pulse improving the app. Hopefully some other suggestions (confirm dial, safari in app, offline data) will make it in to a release one day.

Conclusion… Is this an app I will have on my iPhone? definitely. Is it a front page app? certainly not, but it does have it’s place. It still needs some polish and there are certainly some things to be worked on for a future update. But for now I would recommend downloading it when it is released and use it as an alternative to one of the others.

Tags: app, review, search, yellow
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