Up on the ladder: app

Showing posts with label app. Show all posts

So I’ve delve a bit into dating apps and want to compare them on how they work and what I’ve noticed. This is from a perspective of a woman. I’ve been on these apps out of curiosity and have tried to match with people but nothing too serious. I also haven’t given any of these any money

Bumble So not only can you find a date on this app but they also have separate parts for those wanting to look for friends or career opportunities. You can’t have these active at the same time. What I mean by this is that you won’t get any new likes in your friends or career profile modes if you’re in the dating mode.

I like the prompts they have and other bio features. I feel I can really show who I am the best with Bumble. And each of these others can leave a comment on. If someone leaves a comment they will show up at the top of your Liked You page and it will ask you if you want to reveal their profile which is all free but I think there’s a daily limit. I feel this feature is a great way to stand out compared to the paid SuperLike for just being shown at the top and being able to reveal you with no extra cost.

As I swipe I noticed usually the first person shown is attractive as hell or someone who has Liked me. But if I keep swiping I no longer come across anymore people that have swiped me. The app doesn’t tell me if they like me until I swipe. If I swiped left it will notify me that I missed a match and I will have to pay to go back. When I get SuperLikes they don’t always come up asap. But once they do it will tell you they have SuperLikes you. But again you have to keep swiping until their profile comes up. Sometimes it can take a long time to even find another person that have liked you but this may be due to the allowed distance. My pool of Liked Me people just keeps increasing because none of these people are coming up as I swipe. I feel this might be a design choice to make you pay to show these people to you.

What is nice about Bumble is preventing the men from messaging you first. But if you’re not great at talking like I am it can be a challenge to figure what to say first.

What I find confusing about Bumble is how there’s a separate Bumble app for just finding friends. This seems separate from the BFF mode in the dating app as I had to do a new profile and none of my Liked Me is transferred ver.

I didn’t seem to come across scammers or bots on there as much as the other apps. Bumble does require your location and will publicly show the town you’re at in your profile. They do have a Travel mode which requires money if you wanted to change your location but it will make it big and obvious that you are using this mode which is is a nice way to flag people who aren’t there locally

Hinge This app I get the least amount of pool of people. I do not get as many likes on there. And the weird part is that the people I swiped left to can come back. So it seems your profile will get shown to people you swiped left to again. Even in a big city!

What I like about Hinge is that you can reveal the people who liked you. The newest one will always be the first one you can reveal and you can only reveal one at a time. They can also leave comments.

You can manually enter your location. I’m so if you wanted to see people from out of town or even in a different country you can! At no cost! I wish Hinge had more people as this is the least greedy app. Filling out your profile is nice too. I like that you can add a note under what relationship you’re looking for.

Badoo This app is interesting. It requires your location on the app but on PC you can manually add a location if you denied it access to your location.

What makes Badoo unique is having a separate page for people nearby. This page shows everyone without a blur which is great! You can tap on a face and it will bring up their bio. You can also send a message and start a chat right away without any swiping or matching. This can be annoying if end up getting spammed but so far I haven’t thankfully.

Another unique feature of Badoo is the notifications. It lets you know when someone just liked you or even looked at your profile from the nearby page.

Something wild about Badoo is that it auto gave me a free trial of their paid features. It didn’t notify me until over a day later that it gave me a free trial. None of the other apps have given a free trial. But now that I could see the list of people who liked me, it does help a lot but it does show the kind of people using it which aren’t my cup of tea.

Tinder Signing up was a pain. It’s takes awhile to get started and if you want to get verified this can also take a bit. I thought I was getting banned because nothing worked. I had to close and reopen the app several times to check if it’ll tell me if I was banned or not. I think this is due to that I did try to make an account before and it recognized me? I did look it up and it does seem like that if you got banned it’s possible to make a new account easily by using different photos and different phone number. There’s a ID verification too which I’m not sure what this really proves other than having your name and age the same.

What I notice right away is bots. Super attractive people with nothing in their bio. If you swipe on them they will match with you and it was easily to detect they’re a bot from just chatting with them.

This app is obviously the most known and there does seem like a huge pool of people and more attractive too. I do like that it does tell you if they liked you if their profile comes up. What is weird is that I have to do taps on the sides to pull up their bio instead of scrolling up and down which every other app does. It shows multiple colored icons on the bottom which aren’t explained. There’s a superLike which is the blue star and the purple lightning which is the boost which I’m not sure what it does. Tinder also has profiles that are not only empty but used photos that had no people in them. It will tell you if they’re nearby or active.

Writing your bio is a bit limiting not as many opportunities to really express yourself. I do like that it has an option to say that you’re looking for friends but this probably not a popular thing on Tinder. There is a neat Explore page where you can choose the kind of vibe you’re going for and show you people who they think falls under it. One is Gaming, another is Free Tonight, and quite a bit more! Not sure how they determine who falls into what since it’s not something you can choose to be in.

One of the benefits of Tinder is that since it’s well known there are extensions that can unblur photos. Sadly Tinder doesn’t let you scroll through the whole list so you can’t see everyone.

I've heard about The Conqueror from an influencer and when I checked it out they started a LOTR series! As a LOTR fan it greatly interested me. The Conqueror is an app that provides distance based challenges and uses locations to determine the distance amount. It gives you a map and the route and shows how much you progress along the route. Once you finish they provide you a medal that is mailed to you. The medals are huge and come with a neck strap so it looks rather similar to a Olympic medal. For the LOTR they give you the map of Middle Earth. These challenges are about $50 per challenge which isn't too bad but not cheap. You can walk, run, or anything else you'd like. You can link fitness apps like The Health app from Apple to automatically input your daily steps, or you can input distance manually. So its possible to "cheat" if you're only interested in the medal than the fitness challenge as you can't buy the medal outright.

I'm not a big fan of how the medals look personally, but I do like The Shire's medal a lot enough to buy it. You can't buy it through the app but rather through their website. Be sure to right your email correctly and it will give you the code to put into the app to start the challenge.

The app experience is relatively simple. As you progress it gives you a simple recap of the movie. The recap is just a screencap with a simple panning or zooming animation with a line from the movie from that scene. There's no music or any other sound. You also get digital postcards that also gets emailed to you. You get a choice of planting trees or removing bottles as another kind of milestone. The map doesn't just show you where you are but other people as well. So overall its pretty simple and not the most exciting thing. I wish it was a bit better!

Since the Shire challenge is 145 miles its going to take me awhile. I will have to update this when I finish it and get the medal!

Both of these dating apps follow the same design, you get someone's profile and you can either be interested or uninterested. There will be a section where people who are interested in you are listed, and a section where people you get matched with will have chat options. I want to share my take on both of these apps!

Hinge's profile requires 6 photos! They're prompts are a bit more interesting than Bumble's. People can respond to your prompts or they can just like your photo or prompts. My first day using it I got like 15 likes. Hinge will only show you the most recent person who liked you. You have to pay more to see everyone. I really enjoy responding to those who left a message to one of my prompts as it was much easier for me to strike up a conversation. Even to those I would normally not be interested in. I do not get alot of likes on this app so that's unfortunate. I wonder if less people use it? Also you can change your location whenever you want and doesn't use your gps. If you want the security of not giving your location to strangers try this app.

Bumble not only has dating, but all BFF, and Biz modes. You can make a profile in any one of them too. I made my profile for bff but have gotten 0 likes, but dating the first day I've gotten 200+ which is a lot more than I got on Hinge. What I don't like is that they don't show anyone who has liked you unless you pay. It does separate them into "New" and "nearby" which is interesting. Bumble uses gps so it will use your location and it will be listed on your profile even though there is a separate prompt to say where you live. From what I understand they will randomly put the people who liked you while you go through people's profiles. It will not tell you if the person has liked you. If you swipe that you're not interested it will say "you missed a potential match" which indicated that person has liked you. This won't happen to every person that liked you either. Sometimes the number on the Liked will just go down one after you swiped not interested. Obviously when you swiped you're interested and you've matched it will mean that person has swiped they're interested. This app has a weird rule that ladies has to be the one to message first when you've matched. Because of the lack of seeing who liked me and going through so many profiles, I have yet to match anyone outside of accidental ones. It is somewhat easy to accidentally trigger a swipe when you're scrolling through the profile. And you have to pay to undo it! The paywall on this app is very annoying and the prices they're charging are insane to me. Sometimes I'd be swiping 30+ profiles and the number of my Liked would not go down. Everyday there be new Likes too. Even though the app is not all helpful in getting me matches, there's just seem so many more people using it than Hinge that I'm still on it.

Givling is an interesting app thats free where people answer trivia, watch ads, buy coins, or do offers to crowdfund to pay off users' debt like student loans, mortgage, etc. The app's UI design isn't the best so it took me a bit to understand how this works, but essentially you can earn money from being winning a random drawing, have the highest score in the trivia competition, or have the most queue points to be the next loan to be crowdfunded. I checked this app out because I'd like to have my student loan debt paid off. I'm not sure if I'll be able to get any money from this app since it seems to be a lot of work, but I will try it out for awhile. So far this seems a more possible way to actually get your student loans paid than any other methods I've seen so far.

The trivia game is simple. You answer as many true or false trivia questions and once you get three wrong answers the game is over. You're put into a team of 3 each time you play, and your scores are added up. Each day you get two free trivia turns to play, and if you want more you'd have to buy coins. I'm not sure how much each question cost in points, but so far in the leaderboard the winners earned around 20,000 in points. I'm not good at trivia and only been able to answer a handful correctly and been able to get 200-600 pts. So getting up to 20,000 I'd probably have to get like 20 trivia right which is impossible for me. The trivia game competition is a week long period that starts and ends on wednesdays. The winning team gets to split prize money of up to $100,000. Not sure how the cash prize money is determinded, but you can see the amount by tapping on the middle three line menu icon and it will say "You're playing for 1/3 of $____" and right now it says the prize is $34,443.

When the funding reaches $35,000 there will be a random drawing to win $10,000. In order to be in the drawing pool you meed to play the free trivia game 10 times in a 30 day period. A numbered star on the left side will let you know how many games you've played. My luck isn't great so I doubt I'd win this.

Everything you do in this app earns you Queue points. There are two different types of ranking: Green competitive, and Orange less competitive. Only difference is that the Green counts points you've earned from buying coins or merchandise. The one who has the most points at the time the current loan is fully funded is next in line to get funding. They will alternate between the rankings so if a green one has its loan funded, the next one is an orange one, and after that one is a green one. At this moment the top users on the green ranking board has around 258,000,000 points. The orange top ranking has around 113,000,000 points. Its a butt load of points! The current loan right now includes an excerpt from the user who says she started this app over a year ago! So it definitely will take a lot of time to be able to earn enough to be next in line. Each one will get $50,000 to use to pay their loan which is a decent amount of money so I feel the time and effort may be worth it especially for those who earn less than 50k a year.

Other than playing the trivia game, buying coins, and doing offers, you can also earn quene points from watching ads! There's a TV icon button on the bottom right where you can watch short ads up to 30 times a day. Once the ad finishes you get to spin a wheel and earn up to 15x in quene points. This is a good way to get your queue points up and climb the ranking. When I signed up and started using this app I got 500,000 points which everyone was awarded with if they played a game that day. So it seems points would be awarded so its worth using this app one a day.

You can also earn points from inviting people so if you'd like to check this app out you can add my invitation code CC764056 on the sign up page!

Nintendo announced the mobile Animal Crossing game called Animal Crossing Pocket Camp recently. While it did say it won't release till late November, it is out in Australia early probably for testing. Though now people are trying to get the Australian version including myself. So if you can't wait, you can google guides on how to get it.

If you're not familiar with Animal Crossing, it is a game where you manage a town and get in good terms with the characters. For this mobile version, you manage a camping site instead of a town. Animal Crossing is a nice chill game to play, but it may bore people. You will mostly be gathering items like fish and fruits to make money off of and use that money to buy things to decorate your campsite and camper.

The campsite has two types of areas: there's space for furniture and separate space of amenities which are labeled as tents. These tents can be leveled up unlike the furniture. Both take time to make, and both require materials which you get from doing requests from the villagers. There are four different types: natural, cute, cool, and sporty. They affect how much the villagers will like you when you have them at your campsite.

To get villagers to your campsite, you find them in other locations and get their level up. Level will start at three to invite them but it will increase as you level up. Max level is 7, but when you craft tents you can level villagers beyond 7. Then you can invite them, but they will give you a list of furniture they require you to have before they go. By doing requests and talking to them, you also level up. Each time you level you unlock a new villager. Since your campsite has a max of 8, you can have more villagers available to talk to by having them at your campsite. When you level high enough, there will be more villagers than there is space. You can use a Calling Card to call a village that isn't anywhere to any of the areas. They would replace the random user that would normally be there so there would be two villagers at an area. Request Cards are to unlock more requests. These requests would usually unlock once they move to a new location.

There are four areas they you'd find villagers and items: Lost Lure Creek, Sunburst Island, Breezy Hollow, and Saltwater Shores. Every 3 hours fruits will respawn and the villagers camping in each are will change thus unlocking more requests. Bugs and fish will take a few seconds to respawn once you've caught everything. Since there is a limited inventory space, you can sell items or put them up in your Marketbox for other users to buy. There is one area where you can buy furniture already made and clothes. Another area is to customize your camper. This is where you can expand the inside of your camper for 10,000 bells. There will be a loan for this like with the house in the console Animal Crossing games. The second camper upgrade costs 30,000 bells and it gives you a small second floor. Third upgrade is a bigger second floor for 50,000 bells. As you level you unlock more camper paint patterns and camper types. The last area is the Quarry which you need 7 friends to get you in or pay Leaf Tickets to get in. This is just breaking 5 rocks and getting reward for it.

Since this is a free mobile game, there is a currency that you can buy with real money and its called Leaf Tickets. You use these tickets to get more space in inventory and crafting. You can use it to immediately finish crafting, and to get a bunch of fish or bugs at once. The most useful thing you can use these tickets is buying more crafting spots as they only limit you to one craft item and one amenity. You can purchase two more spots which you can easily get enough of from doing Timed Goals, Stretched Goals, and leveling. Each spot costs 80 leaf tickets.

I have played Animal Crossing before and it is nice to play, but sometimes it can feel like work with all the weed pulling and fishing and bug catching is not terribly easy sometimes. This game makes it really easy to catch bugs and fish. I do like this much simpler Animal Crossing game. Overall I am really enjoying it so far so and plus its really cute. I highly recommend it!

While there are a number of bookkeeping apps that you can use, most of them seem to require you to sign up an account and link accounts to them. I am personally not comfortable with this, and would rather input everything manually. So I took some time to find ones that don't require internet or an account. Unfortunately most of the ones I've found don't look that great, but I've found two that seem to be decent and didn't have terrible UI design.

Finances

This is a free app with a very minimalist design but its not ugly at least to me. There is a paid version of this app so there are limitations to the free version. The paid version is $9.99 and the biggest benefit to the paid version is adding more than 20 transactions per month. You can just add the total amount per category at the end of the month to sort of get by this 20 limit.

What I like the most about this app is the ability to have different accounts. You can make accounts for different bank accounts, sources of income, by family members, hobby, and anything else. I find this to be very helpful and easy to keep things organized. You can put income and expenses organized within accounts. The categories are all shared between income and expenses so you can really organize those into which would go for income or expenses. You can totally customize them ad give them a color.

There are statistics by text, bar graph, and line graph. he bar and line graphs are paid version only. You can recurring transactions and transactions than transfer from one account to another. Overall, this is really simple to use and understand bookkeeping app that I would recommend trying out.

Coinkeeper

This app sets itself apart by having to drag your bank account to the expense categories to make a transaction entry. This app has more options than the Finances app, and it does take a bit to understand what does what. Its not as easy to understand and use as Finances. This also has a paid version or subscription, and has more limits than Finances does. Calendar is blocked, having more tags is blocks, and a number of other things are blocked.

I find this to be good for those who want to budget they money. There's options to add debt, a savings goal, and budget goals. Both bank/income and expenses have their own categories and you can change the default ones to whatever you want them to be. The income default ones are Wallet and Bank account, but you can change them to be whatever. You can't change its color. but you can change the icons. The icons are nice, but wish there were more. You can also add tags but these are locked for paid versions so I can't say if tags are helpful or not. You can only have 10 expenses categories in the free version.

While its not as clean and simple as Finances, it does do the same sort of thing just more. I do recommend giving it a try if it seems something that can help you. There is a bar graph and lists out all your transactions in each category, its not the easiest thing to look at personally.

Overall, both are decent apps and hard for me to really choose between the two. So I would say try them both out for awhile and see if one works better for you.

I saw this game pop up at the App store and thought it sounded silly though not silly enough for me to pass it. The art is cute and the game is really simple. Its like a cookie clicker game where it auto accumulate points over time.

You can tap multiple times to get one point or one Marriage Registration for one Love Point per tap. There is a list of 16 husbands you can unlock. When you unlock them they will increase the LP per sec, and appear in this wedding garden background. Each husband has 4 items you can unlock (one is a secret illustration) and each increases the LPS (love point per sec). You need to level each husband up which also requires LP. Other than, there's a list of achievements which you get a special illustration when you unlock them all.

Overall, a real simple game that you can waste space in you device with. I will try to unlock all the husbands and show screenshots here.