I have been using streamzoo for a small period of time now. I usually try out any Android photo sharing app that allows filters and all such effects to be applied to photos and thus at any point use a couple. Streamzoo seems to be the nicer of the lot. It has:

• a nice clean dashboard
• an ability to follow #streams (think of hash-tags) - the app does great work in this 'social' side of things. Streams can be followed and thus make for great sense.
• a set of small and sensible photo editing options including some good filters
• a small but sensible set of effects
• allows posting to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr
• interesting photos crop up when you check out what is popular

So, is it "Instagram for Android" ? Unlikely. But it is better enough than all the others to be a contender and even a must-have Android app on its own.

What I miss

• an ability to upload only over WiFi as an option. I don't like to do uploads over 3G
• an ability to work offline. For example, use the app to click the photo, edit it, put it to the upload queue all without needing to get connected

Just a note to say that the app does seem to work. Both for scanning ISBNs and creating a ToRead as well as adding books to the Read shelf on Goodreads.com

The Indian Android Developer Contest folks have put up the criteria for judging an app. I gave it a quick read and ended up wondering whether the following would have been a better alternative.

• Usability - whether the app does what it claims to do
• Security - whether the app is inherently insecure
• Fault Tolerance - whether the app fails gracefully or, just decides to rampantly go awry
• Service Tolerance - whether the app, if backed with a custom service, can handle high transactional loads
• Geolocation awareness - whether the app, if required, can handle geo-location gracefully
• Content Freshness - whether the app does collect and collate relevant content that is local (depends on the point above)
• Platform Consumption - whether the app makes best and optimal use of the API provided by the underlying platform
• Hardware Tolerance - whether the app factors in difference in hardware specifications across handsets with compatible OS
• Feature Completeness - whether the app has differentiating features from other apps in same category
• Consumer building - whether the app devels take time to build a community of users/consumers using social media and market feedback means

I'd also have fancied the names of the judges to be made available.

The folks at Taazza suggested that I might like to use their app. Unfortunately, that specific version seemed to have some issues with the phones and moving the app to the SD card. So, once I did provide that feedback they were nice to email a couple of us with a preview release which is also scheduled to hit the Android Market. Since the premise is to provide specifically local content, the only way to give it a spin was to get local at a couple of places (Hadapsar, Magarpatta, KalyaniNagar, Koregaon Park, MG Road, Moledina Road were my places) and see how it goes.

I like the app and, I'd recommend it as a fun one to have around.

It is light and fast, has a clean interface that allows some interesting things like providing news about deals with when they expire (that's fun to keep track of), weather information and, some reasonably detailed listing about Places (restaurants, movies/theatres and so forth). I specifically like the way it handles the City News via aggregation. For me that's a nice way to read news around and about Pune. And it does a seriously good job with that which can be tested by changing the location. The deals/information can be shared using email/Facebook/Twitter and, orders can be placed via Web or, a print-ready coupon. The means to select additional cities to read news items about is also a plus.

Having said all of that there's a couple of things I'd like the app to improve in the coming versions:

• handle the slight stutter when changing between tabs or, scrolling quickly. The app visibly stalls and stutters for a slight moment before reloading the content
• in the landscape orientation the scrolling requires some work - it just is a bit slow
• in the landscape orientation (why would an app like this require a landscape ? :)), the content reflow is a bit awkward
• geolocation - this is currently what I'd like to get fixed. The app seems to save a location and each time one has to re-locate oneself to get local (or, hyper local) information. I'd have wanted an automatic re-location and hence a refresh of the content. So, basically I would want to activate the app, or, navigate to the app and I'd like it to use an existing and active data connection to geo-locate me and figure out the content to fetch and display.
• content -> activity. In other words, I know that I can get the contact numbers of a movie theatre with the app. But, how do I make bookings ? For a restaurant, a contact number might be enough to call up and make a reservation, I guess that doesn't work out nicely for theatres and movies/plexes etc
• more content is required and that is probably going to be cyclically linked to more usage

In short, good job but there's more to be done. And, the page probably requires some means to put in feature requests and rankings :)