Junda Ong who makes the popular SG-series of iPhone apps has added a new one to the mix – possibly one that will rake him a nice income – SG Girls (iTunes Link) is available for US$3.99.
SG Girls display public photos on the Internet with the theme “Singapore Girls”. This is an application to appreciating oriental beauties.
Just what any hot-blooded guy needs on their iPhone…It features streaming of photographs, zooming, ratings and the ability to save the photos.
Like most developers, Junda had faced problems getting approval for the app to be approved by Apple. But after two over months, the app finally shows up today.
For those who aren’t fluent in hokkien, mai tu liao literally meant let’s not wait… maybe, just maybe the Gods in Cupertino heard my plea.
Story behind SG Girls
The app came about after some prompting from Junda’s friend to make him an app that he would use daily. Somehow, the idea of seeing the daily top pictures from a popular local photo site came to mind. With two weeks of coding, he came up with a system backed by a distributed Mac system that will source a selected few photo sharing sites for photos that matches the “SG Girl” criteria and stream them via the app.
One of the criteria is that no sleazy photos will be distributed so as not to contravene Apple’s strict restrictions over the apps that appear in the App Store. Junda also wants to make the app as a “clean, premium photography app”.
First look at the SG Girls
The app works as advertise. Upon loading, it automatically streams photos of girls from various photo sites like Flickr, PhotoBucket and Picassa, to name a few. Occasionally, you will see the Flickr’s “The Photo is current unavailable” placeholder.
One thing to note is the app is a bandwidth sucker, with each photo averaging between 50-100 KBs, those with limited data plan should try to use this app only when WIFI is available.
The controls are minimal (click on image), and only appear when you tap once on the screen. You get to scroll back and forth, rate the photos and also the option to save to your Photo app. There is also an option to “flag” the photo and another button that gives the instruction and description of the app.
A suggestion is to expand the options available when one “flag” the photo. Besides inappropriate content, owners or the subject in the photographs should also be allowed to indicate that they want the image removed. The issue of image usage is tricky in this context as there are sites that are not strict in protecting the usage rights of the content owner.
I guess one would like to know how are the qualities of the photos shown. To each his own, but there are photos that are street candids which I feel, are photos which won’t meet the app’s objective of showcasing “oriental beauties”.
As Junda said himself, the app is very raw after just two weeks of development. There is a market for such an app and when he fine tunes SG Girls, don’t be surprised to see similar apps showcasing beauties from the region.
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