Touch Poet

By Christine Morris on February 25th, 2009
Our Rating: :: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
iPhone App - Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad

A unique application to create fantastic poems. It gives you words taken from the works of Shakespeare, Ancient Mariner, Kipling and E. A. Poe. It then adds to the mix a feed from news and Digg. This allows you to create interesting poems which uses the words of past masters mixed with current trends. Poems can then be published to Twitter or using e-mail.

A unique application to create fantastic poems. It gives you words taken from the works of Shakespeare, Ancient Mariner, Kipling and E.A. Poe. It then adds to the mix a feed from news and Digg. This allows you to create interesting poems which uses the words of past masters mixed with current trends. Poems can then be published to Twitter or using e-mail.

This application is great! Touch Poet really lets you have fun creating interesting poems. You can select which sources you want to use in your writing. There is a choice of Shakespeare, Ancient Mariner, Kipling and E. A. Poe. You can also select from news and Digg or add your own words to the poem.

The interface is really clean, echoing the recycling look of a paper bag. The reason why this application is great is because the isn’t a boring text editor. The words are written on little ‘scraps’ of paper. When you click the small arrow for a new word it comes out at the bottom and you then just click it to move it into place. (It’s similar to when you get magnet packs of words to write something on your fridge.)

These small pieces of paper are really responsive and move smoothly along the screen. You simply place them in the order you want, and when they are matching up to form your sentence a blue line underlines the words. The words also turn blue themselves to acknowledge that they are part of the sentence. Even if you don’t actually create a poem with the words, its really fun to drag them around and move them around. Visually, it is a superb use of the iPhone and its capabilities.

A few things that might improve this would be the ability to ‘lock’ a word in place. Sometimes you hit a word too hard and a few go flying so you can loose what you had written. Also, it can be difficult to create something interesting if you have only one source selected so you should be sure to select a few.

I would like to see the ability to save my creation as an image rather than just the text, cause it looks so fantastic! I like the way the words are so physical and placed specifically that I would want to see it again. I liked the background a lot but some users love to customize everything and perhaps an inclusion of background choices may be nice for them. Also maybe when you send it to Twitter they should warn you that you have used too many characters and it won’t all be posted, just the first 140 minus the #poetry hash tag.

Overall this is a really stylish and unusual looking application with great function. You’ll find friends and family want to play with it, and may find yourself spending hours creating ‘interesting’ poems. Really innovative, well thought out and designed. It’s a keeper!

Touch Poet

iPhone App - Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad
Buy Now: $2.99

Our Rating: :: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
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Released: 2009-02-10 :: Category: Entertainment