After calling the UMF Essential iPhone app “The only iPhone App you need at Ultra Music Festival” and providing an in-depth review on the app that a 2 person team made as a service to Ultra attendees, UMF decided to get the application pulled from the app store. They may have threatened legal action or just went directly to apple that this iPhone was was intruding on their intellectual property and profiting off the festival…
Whatever the reason, I know that UMF had their own official iPhone app last year. UMF Essential was for iPhone and Android while the official app is iPhone only. I remember last year how poorly UMF’s app sucked and was thrilled that the unofficial one that cost $1.99 didn’t require an Internet connection to browse the schedule and it allowed you to schedule what acts you wanted to see with complete bios based on data from Wikipedia with some neat videos that got the attendee pumped for UMF!
The scheduling aspect of it was great! Well, I still have that app so I can keep using it but those of you who didn’t get it out of luck but there’s hope!
Ultra Music Festival has released their official 2011 iPhone app update. Here are some screenshots.
So, the whole “loading updates” screen has returned. It slows the application’s start time and, when 50,000 people are in a small park in downtown Miami, that screen turns into a 5-10 minute wait for the updated artist list when, if you only updated the app 5 minutes ago and need to re-check something, you’ll be waiting AGAIN for the list to update. It wastes time. There’s an update button on UMF Essential’s app but you can hit it whenever you want and, if you’re offline, it won’t try to update and let you go right to the set-list. This updating screen may not be a big deal to the UMF promotors when they’re beta-testing, but at the park, conference-goers will have to wait and wait and wait if they’re on AT&T and so is everyone else. Have fun quickly launching the app to see updates on performances. You’re better off sticking with the paper handouts they give you.
The design isn’t useful. it’s pretty but not useful. Changing views is a painfull process as the iPhone app sometimes scrolls left to right but sometimes thinks you’re going up and down so you have to try a few times to switch between stages on each of the days. The artists that will be at UMF are still not current. BT and Tiesto aren’t even in there. I hope that changes before Friday.
There is no scheduler! You’re going to waste a ton of time browsing through each of the stages 1 by 1 to see who’s on each stage. The calendar view of UMF Essential was exceptional.
And, see how quickly this crap was thrown together? Look at the last screen in the search window (click for full screen). They threw a search box over some other box that was there before! They have some random element that’s there from another project. How did no one see this? Hopefully none of the 50,000 attendees will see this.
Finally, I’m including a screen shot of UMF Essential’s scheduler view which I’m going to use on Friday to plan out my day!
As I said in my last post, “UMF thinks UMF Essential is not good for the user? Prove it by releasing something better. Instead, they killed it.” I really had high hopes for this year’s Ultra Music Festival iPhone app but they released the same crappy one as last year with updated graphics and killed the useful application made by a small mom and pop shop.
For shame.