The blog of Maxence TAÏEB

Review in French for a French app.

SNCF Transilien

Je viens de découvrir que la SNCF avait sorti une appli iPhone dédié au réseau transilien, SNCF Transilien. Il y avait déjà l’application SNCF  plus générique donnant les horaires de toutes les gares en France et qui était assez pratique pour savoir si on doit courir ou non pour avoir son transilien en sortant du métro

L’application est clair, en page d’accueil on peut chercher son prochain train puis l’ajouter en favori, voir l’info trafic de toutes les lignes, ou rechercher un itinéraire. SNCF Transilien propose aussi de recevoir des alerts sur les lignes que l’on utilise. Surement pratique en cas d’accident, ou de retard sur la ligne. On peut choisir de recevoir les infos entre 2 tranches horaires, pratique pour ne pas être pollué d’alert! Enfin il y a la possibilité de voir le plan du réseau transilien et de voir les horaires du noctilien la nuit.

Today I tested 2 famous app which has been updated : lindekin & fourquare

Linkedin

Linkedin finally launched today a new version of its iPhone app. New options was integrated on linkedin.com while the application kept its Facebook-like design. I did not use it so much.

The new version is different, they worked on the design for the menu. For example the tab “You” looks like to a badge, or behind Inbox you can see an envelop.

You can now see on the top left “Linkedin Today” and the “Recent Updates”, even if I never use it (are you using it?). The Inbox is basic but it does its work.

The disappointing point is the “Group & More”. It seems that the needed a 4th option but did not know what to put. When you click on it, you have 2 options : “People you may know” and “Groups”. They choose to have 4 big icons, while the last one of not fully integrated to the app.

To conclude :

• the app is very fast
• they tried something interesting with the design
• but all linkedin options are not well-integrated to the app.

Foursquare is upgrading again its iPhone app! After a small but efficient redesign and the add of notifications last month, Foursquare is adding steps by steps options.

The new update is bringing friends’ check-in photos to the stream of the iPhone app. It’s very nice and quick to see the food your friends are eating at this restaurant, or the decoration the other friend liked in the bar he is drinking.

They also added small other redesigns, for example you can now comment check-in in 1 click.

@Dens already announced on foursquare’s blog that they are going to add the lists to the mobile apps.

Today I tried 2 application turning around Facebook

Facebook Messenger

Facebook launched on Tuesday Facebook Messenger. It’s the next step to a global inbox where the email, the chat, the text-message are mixed. The application is focused to message, it competes with BlackBerry Messenger, Whatsapp, Google Huddles, or the future iMessage but with 750 million potential users !

My fist impression is a very fluid & fast application. The message can be geocallized so that you know where your friends you are talking to are ! You can send group message. You can even text friends who are not on Facebook if they download the app.

Since Facebook provides video-chat thanks to Skype on its website, we are surprised not to see it in the application, however some people analyzed the application and detected some piece of code talking about video-calling !

MyPad for Facebook

The official Facebook for iPhone is quite good, but it’s always good to have some choice. MyPad, which is originally an iPad Application for Facebook, launched his app for iPhone. When you open the app, it goes directly to the landscape and offer a “twitter-for-ipad-like” interface. You can select on the right your newsfeed, friends, inbox, photo. Thank to the multi-pane interface, you can come back to the view you originally click in. I like the interface, which is completely different to the Facebook for iPhone one. Let’s see if they can reach the 5 million downloads they did with MyPad for iPad.

EyeEM

It’s Photography App I found on GigaOM last week. We can discover new Photo Apps everyday, which are competiting with instagram or color. However this one want to bring the simplicity back to photo apps. When you take a pic, you can find all the classic features (geolocalisation, effect, sharing) but also they created a smart auto-tagging system. They call it Vibes. For example, when I took a pic in Appsfire office, they propose me the vibe “Appsfire HQ”. I guess they took this information from foursquare. They added Paris for the city and France for the country. And a verb “playing” which I switched to “working”. They should have seen Appsfire HQ as an office, so put the verb “working” but they didn’t. EyeEm is very nice because it adds context automatically to pictures.

GLMPS

As I told you, a photo app a day GLMPS aims to add a quick video to your picture. It’s true that when you take a picture, they is a short moment between the beginning and the end of the pic. It’s when you say “Chees” or “Thank you” and it’s often a funny moment. So why not keeping ? I think it’s an interesting concept which could be implementing as an option in each cameras.

*this post is my opinion, it doesn’t reflect any opinions at Appsfire

I received this morning a update of OleaPark app. I met Karl, Co-Founder of OleaPark, last Thursday, he told me he submitted his last build to Apple and was waiting for their approval. OleaPark allows you to connect with people around you. I like the idea to connect to people nearby. The concept is similar to Color but for meeting people. To keep a tracking of people who were with you at a specific time and in a specific place.

LFP (Officiel) is the official iPhone application for fans of the French Football Ligue. You will find the news, the live game, results, ranking… all these features are already available with Eurosport & L’équipe app except the team composition, which is a Plus.

Other Update since last post :

• Travel’r, Amazon Mobile FR, Look’n'Be, SNCF Direct, Angry Bird Free, Flexilab, RATP, Tumblr, Yakatag, Bump

Hi,

As I am trying a lot of iPhone application these days because of my work at appsfire, I decided to share with you some apps I download.

Today I download Snapette. I found this app when I was searching for competitors of my website So Stylish. I am also going to focus on Bags & Shoes in the next few weeks… stay tune. Snapette is a instagram-like for shoes & bags, you take a pic, you add a brand, a store, a price and it’s done. Classic features like “comment”, “like”, “follow” are present. I like the icon within the app.

I also tried Greplin. Greplin allows you to search all your cloud service in one place. For example, you worked about a subject but you don’t remember if you write a document in Google Docs, or in a Word file in Dropbox. You search with Greplin and you will find all your documents, emails, messages… The iPhone application is simple, you can search in your service, and add new one’s.

I hope I will have time to continue this everyday.

Max

I haven’t blogged over the past 8 months, so I am very happy to write a new post today.

As it is a personal blog, I am mostly using it to make a point about my life, for example, I announced at the same period last year that I was joining ESCP Europe to do the master (Some news about my coming-up year).

I have been very busy because I was doing a master in Entrepreneurship & Innovation (website was designed by @lmolter and coded by me) at ESCP Europe, and I was working on So Stylish. I am also writing about Internet news on IsraelValley.

I am very excited because next week I am going to start a 6-month internship at Appsfire, a startup founded by Ouriel Ohayon (editor of Techcrunch France until February 2009) and Yann Lechelle. I am going to work on several tasks :

1. Assist in creating marketing material for our commercial efforts
2. Help in organizing Appsfire’s various events aimed at the developper’s and advertiser’s community
3. Lead and manage our QA, product testing efforts
4. Animate our community (blog, content creation, twitter account, facebook page)

I think I sum up quickly what I did over the past 8 months and what’s coming up for next months.

PS : I am still going to manage So Stylish, so keep posting new outfits

I recently launch the website So Stylish, where you can upload a picture, describe your look and share it on facebook or twitter.

So Stylish exports the model of twitter to share looks. I let you surf on the So Stylish because it is better to try than to talk about.

Please send me feedbacks about it and if you wanna test it, just write me a comment with your email and I will send you an invitation code.

PS : So Stylish also have a twitter account http://twitter.com/So_Stylish