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Louvre iPhone app: Quelle horreur!
The woefully incomplete Louvre app for iPhone offers little to smile about.
J'adore France and the French people. But I'm pretty disappointed with Musee du Louvre, a free but painfully brief virtual tour of the famous museum.
The app consists of four main sections. In Louvre: The Visit, you get a video tour of seven well-known areas of the museum, including The Venus de Milo and Mona Lisa.
However, each "tour" lasts less than 20 seconds, and the default language is French. If you tap the screen to bring up the controls and then tap the language icon, you can select English (or German or Japanese), but there's no way to make it the default. You have to perform this step for each video, each time you watch it.
In Artworks, you get a Cover Flow-style selection of famous paintings--but only 20 of them. Tap one to get information about the work, a zoom-and-pan-able full-screen view, and a map showing its location within the museum.
The Palace follows the same format, but focuses on areas of the Louvre itself rather than individual artworks.
Finally, there's the prerequisite visitor information, including hours and admission fees--but no maps to or of the museum (save for the aforementioned few).
Musee du Louvre does let you bookmark any item for easy reference, but with so little content, this seems rather pointless. Hopefully the curators developers will turn this incomplete tease of an app into the rich, arts-friendly resource it should be.
In the meantime, anyone planning a visit to the actual museum would be much better served by Rick Steves' Louvre Tour ($4.99).
Rick Broida, a technology writer for nearly 20 years, is the author of more than a dozen books. In addition to writing CNET's The Cheapskate blog, he oversees BNET's Business Hacks. Rick is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CBS Interactive. Disclosure. Deals found on The Cheapskate are subject to availability, expiration, and other terms determined by sellers. Follow Rick on Twitter at cheapskateblog.
This is just a light taste of what there is to see at the actual museum, it is in no way meant to replace actually going.
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by vesuviocnet
November 19, 2009 9:42 AM PST
- I really need to disagree with the negative tone of this review. It is obvious that the developers have worked closely with the curators to come up with an elegant looking applications that provides information in an intuitive and rich user experience.
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(3 Comments)Could there be more works of art or longer video clips included in it? yes, but how large an app would that become (without it needing to download files in real time?)
Perhaps version 2.0 will expand upon the available art works and videos by way of a membership fee...
I would agree that giving users the ability to set a language at the beginning of the experience would make more sense.