Quick Review: Precious

Quick glance of relevant information... That's what Precious does. It gives you recent market prices for an ounce of gold and an ounce of silver. These prices are updated each time your WIMM One syncs.

The display has a stack of gold coins with its price on top, a stack of silver coins with its price below, and the date and time of the last quote update. It's cute but not as extensive as, for example, the Stock Market Indices app.

Before I get to the rating, I want to offer a couple ideas about where apps like this could go. First though, this is a wonderful first screen. Easy to read, easy to act on. I would not mind seeing an "update now" button (with a shorter caption) that makes the app request an immediate sync, rather than having to fish back to Settings to get an update.

So some concrete ideas:

1. If the information is a available, add additional screens, accessible by swiping, that show trends for gold and silver, perhaps intraday, weekly, monthly, yearly, and historically.
2. Show prices relative to opening price for the day. I want to know if gold is spiking or taking.
3. Add platinum and palladium. These would distinguish the serious precious metals bug from the typical Ron Paul delegate. Keep the size of the icons and prices, but use vertical scrolling to get to the other prices.

Here's the scenario I'm getting to... Imagine you're at lunch with an old friend and it's the first time you've shown them your WIMM One. You bring up Precious and see the stale price quotes. You tap "Update" and within 15 seconds have updated quotes. That's cool, fun, informative. Then you swipe right twice and down once and have a yearly chart for silver. Trends right on your wrist. Your old friend would be impressed.

Rating: WI–MMMM
I give this app 4 Ms. It's easy on the eyes. The developer, Nolte Burke, has figured out how to pull live information off the Internet periodically and display it nicely. I think the app could "go deeper" and be a richer, more interactive experience when you need that, while remaining quick and simple most of the time.