Fantasy Football is definitely my second love, you know, right behind iPhone apps. I become a completely different person right around the end of summer… my Sunday beer consumption goes up right along with my pizza consumption, girls stop talking to me until I adapt to my football craze, and I spend many a night studying rosters even though my teams are usually fine. I may be compulsive, and in my compulsion, I have to be near a computer at all times just in case something happens. You just never know when Tom Brady will get hurt in practice forcing you to pick up Brian Hoyer on the fly before anyone else knows about it.

Chris Hall, as of the 2008 Fantasy Football season, was that guy. I had to know all the news before anyone else, because I had to win. 2009 Chris is a bit different though. No, I like the game just the same, but this time I have a real advantage. In the most Apple way possible, I can reasonably say that there is an app for that.

The ESPN Fantasy Football 2009 app is the answer to my needs, as I am playing in 3 leagues hosted by ESPN (I also play in 4 Yahoo! leagues, so I’ll have the review of that app up later). The app is a fully featured ESPN fantasy app, giving you the power to check lineups, move around players, make trades, pick up free agents, and even check fantasy scores. With this app, you really don’t need to own a computer for anything but the initial draft, creating a perfect storm of awesome on the iPhone.

Being a complete desktop replacement, I decided to run the app through the paces, just to see if it could keep up with my manic nature. The first thing that I wanted to see with the app was its ability to accurately keep the score of my fantasy match. It kills me not to be in front of a computer during football games for the sole reason that I never know when I’m scoring. After all, I only have one TV, and there are so many games going on. I was originally going to do this review yesterday, but with the NFL season starting last night, I had the perfect opportunity to test the app. To my delight, the app provided nice, up to date scores. There was a glitch though that I found while score checking though. On ESPN’s website, there is this cool feature that tells you the predicted final score of the matchup. This score is constantly changing due to who is scoring and who isn’t, and is usually fairly entertaining to watch. Unfortunately, on the app version, the projected total is just how many points the team has. For example, the team I’m playing against has Plaxico Burress, who had 100+ yards and a touchdown in week 1, scoring his team 25 points. On the website, the teams projected total skyrocketed due to this unexpected outburst, but on the app the projected total is 25. 25… really?

Looking past that, the rest of the app is pretty straight forward. Moving players around is as easy as hitting the ‘M’ button next to the players name, and trading players is as easy as hitting ‘propose trade’. If you need to pick up the next Matt Cassell of the free agent list, just go to the player section and hit the ‘C’ button. Maybe I’m being dumb here, but I’m not entirely sure what the C stands for here… oh well. Other tasks such as checking the standings are performed by clicking on the easy to find buttons up top. I’ll tell you right now though that ‘easy to find’ is not the same as ‘easy to push’. For some reason, it usually takes me 2-3 clicks on a button to hit it just right… not a big deal, but it could be easier.

Another nice feature that the app includes is a page with a ton of fantasy news stories. It’s pretty nice when you are on the road and just want some simple Start/Sit advice, but, like the rest of ESPN, it is riddled with ‘Insider’ articles. Maybe I just need to bite the bullet and get ‘Insider’. I don’t know though, I have a real hard time throwing money at people telling me that players will have good games from week to week… there is definitely no gospel in football.

One last thing, and this irks me a bit. After paying $4.99 to basically see my fantasy score in real time (which, oddly enough, I’m more than happy to do), there is a nasty Bud Light add sitting at the bottom of the screen tempting me with a ‘Tailgate Approved’ slogan. Did I really just pay ESPN $4.99 to have them show me ads? I guess that Cable TV has no problem with it… it’s just not something that I would think to see in an iPhone app.

I may seem like I have alot of complaints, but to me, I have to have this app. I’d liken the $4.99 purchase of ESPN FF09 to buying a Russian built car in Soviet Russia. Sure, I can complain all I want, but at the end of the day, I still need a car. Go ahead and pick this one up all you fantasy hooligans… you and I both know that you absolutely need those live scores.

ProCreative Golf 09 contains many of the features the other competing golf apps have, scorecards from a large database of courses around the U.S., links to course information, a statistics tracker, the ability to email scorecards and statistics, and a way to mark shots. Some of the more unique features I encountered were the ability to create notes for specific holes on each course and linking contacts to players. But is it worth $14.99?

The scorecard, in portrait mode, is probably one of the coolest looking interfaces for a golf app that I’ve seen yet. When creating new golfers in the app, it gives you the option to import a contact as the golfer. As a result, the name is already filled in for you as well a picture is displayed on the scorecard if the contact has a picture linked to it. The app gives you the option to click a plus sign for each stroke.  This is great because if, like me, you’re fairly new to golf and occasionally end up with 8 strokes on some par 5s then you can potentially actually forget the amount of strokes you had that hole. With this app you can press the plus sign after each stroke.

Unfortunately I didn’t get to try this out. I was on my way to a round of golf with my friend and was searching for the courses that I play at in my area and only found one of the three that I commonly go to. One course that I found was the name of my favorite course before it changed ownership. This would have been fine except for the fact that the course’s phone number, website, and the course itself completely changed. The course that I went to simply wasn’t on the list.  This didn’t upset me much considering I had my favorite golf companion, GolfCard, with me and it had the course I was going to in the list. To someone just buying ProCreative Golf 09 for $14.99 and not being able to use it, this would have been a disappointment to say the least. But, had GolfCard also not had the course I was going to, I still wouldn’t have been upset because GolfCard has it’s course editor for situations just like this – something ProCreative Inc. should consider in their next update.

Back to positives, the great-looking scorecard also had the option to input some more detailed statistics for each hole. If you press the down arrow, a drop box appears where you can enter whether or not you hit the fairway (or to what direction you missed), how many penalties, how many putts, whether or not you spent time in a  sand trap, and it figures out whether or not you obtained a GIR or an Up & Down (which by the way, I just had to look up Up & Down) based on the information you enter.

If you turn your iPhone/Touch to landscape, you get a traditional-looking view of a scorecard – I love this. ProCreative Golf 09’s scorecard is to GolfCard’s scorecard is like a HD video compared to digital clock screen, at least in an aesthetic sense. The only problem I have with the landscape “view” of the scorecard is just that, it is only a view, you can’t enter scores from this mode, only view the scorecard. Also commenting on the visuals and comparing to GolfCard, ProCreative Golf uses light colors and high contrast for the scorecard. This is a huge plus because it conserves on battery. For GolfCard, I have to turn my brightness all the way up in order to effectively see the scorecard in the intense light situation you find yourself in when playing golf. ProCreative obviously thought of this ahead of time, I was able to clearly see the scorecard on the lowest brightness setting while I was outside.

Marking a shot is fairly simple in this application. You can track and measure the distance of the shot by using the GPS at the starting point and the ending point of the shot, this is also the part that allows you to enter the club you used. If you prefer not to use the GPS constantly while you are golfing (such as myself), you can enter each distance manually. Manually is much quicker and conserves battery (considering that you are not using the GPS). Most of the time you can get a decent guess on how far you hit the ball based on the markers at a course, the GPS option is nice but not absolutely necessary to track your shots.

The statistics are displayed in beautiful looking bar graphs and percentages. The graph displays your eagles, birdies, pars, etc as well as putts, putt average, GIRs, Up & Downs, sand saves, and penalties for each round of golf. It has a slider that allows you to quickly move between stats for different rounds of golf and a total stat area at the bottom with your average score, handicap, fairway percentage, GIRs, par average, and putt average.

When checking out the statistics section was also when I finally started encountering more problems than just the lack of a course editor. First of all, the only way to save the actual scorecard is to email it to yourself immediately after playing the round of golf. Once the round of golf is complete, the only bit of information you have about that round of golf is the statistics page. This isn’t sufficient for me. There are plenty of times where me or one of my friends will go back in my GolfCard application and check out what we scored on specific holes the last time we were at it or specific stats, with ProCreative Golf 09 you cannot do this unless you email yourself all of your scorecards and keep them in a saved folder that you can access from your phone. The second problem that I encountered was that you cannot input information for a round of golf that doesn’t consist of the “owner” of the app playing. The “owner” golfer cannot be deleted and, though the name can be changed, it will be present on every scorecard with no option to remove. This may not seem like a big deal but I also keep stats for any of my friends that would like me to, I ask only that they bring me their scorecard when they are finished with a round. I then proceed to enter their scores into my application and allow it to average into the rest of their stats. The only way to get around this is to change which golfer is listed as the “owner” of the app in the “Configure” section before starting a new round of golf, you also have to do this to view the bar graphs for any golfer other than yourself.

If ProCreative Inc can add a course editor, a place that saves all scorecards in their entirety, a simpler way to check stats from other players, and the ability to remove the “owner” from a round a golf then I will actually start using this app instead of GolfCard. But until then, the $14.99 price tag is not worth it while GolfCard is still selling for $7.99.

Tee off with the do-it-all golf application, GolfCard, and stop worrying about penciling in scores in your cart and attempting to keep detailed stats. GolfCard has everything the casual or professional golfer could ask for in a golf application – a simple golf card with complex options, stat tracking with graphs and tables, integration with Oobgolf.com, handicap calculation, course editor, and score sharing.

Originally, I only bought the application because it was a scoring card for my iPhone and I wanted somewhere to store all of my scores without saving a bunch of cards. At that point, the $7.99 price tag was worth it just for the score card. After using the application a few times and trying out some of the other features, this app is going to be the perfect golfing companion for me this summer.

The golf card itself is easy to use but still has a lot of options for more detail. To enter a score for a certain hole, you simply tap that square and press number of strokes. This is quick and keeps you from standing around playing with your iPhone/iPod Touch so that you can actually enjoy golfing. But for more options, such as entering the number of chips or putts for that hole, you press “more” and you have the option to pick the club you used to tee off, whether or not you hit the fairway, whether or not you achieved a G.I.R., the number of chips, sand shots, putts, and penalties. It’s also important to mention that GolfCard automatically calculates handicaps for each golfer. I’ve yet to experience this part of the application because I haven’t played enough at the same course to accumulate a handicap.

On top of all the stats, you can change the size of the card with three size options, use it in landscape or portrait mode, and set the tee colors for each player so the appropriate distances are shown. When the round of golf is over, GolfCard gives you the option to email the scores – email the scores to everyone you just played with or anyone else or upload them to Oobgolf.com. It also has three emailing options – text email (for people who use their cellphones to check their mail and can’t see html) and two different kinds of html mail, one with more information and one with less.

GolfCard has a detailed statistics system based on what you enter in your scorecards and is split into graphs or a table. You can view any of the stats you can take on the scorecard as a graph. For example, you can view your total strokes average over 30 days for a specific course (see the picture). The table shows your averages for all of the statistics you’ve taken at a given course as well as for each round of golf. There are two things in the statistics section that I am looking for. One may have just been a programming problem. Say you go and play the front nine holes of a course and then come back another time and play the full 18 holes; GolfCard keeps stats for two separate courses – a Front 9 course and a Full course. This is a problem because if you wanted to check your overall stats for the front 9 of a course, all the times you played the full course wouldn’t be included. My second wish for GolfCard is the option to compare two or more player’s stats side-by-side.

If GolfCard doesn’t have the course you are going to in it’s database of thousands of courses then you can use it’s course editor which allows you to fully create the course’s card. As a quick note, the thousands of courses are not preloaded. You must download a course’s information before using it’s scorecard – this is extremely fast though. I prefer this method considering I don’t need my phone’s memory being taken up by courses I’m hundreds of miles from. The course editor allows you to enter the phone number, website, address, traditional or disc golf, the number of courses, tees, course rating, slope, standard scratch score, tee distances, pars, and stroke indices. If you fill out all of the information for the course then there is no difference between a downloaded course or one you create yourself – for me this is a great feature because I’m the kind of person that does research for each CD I have on my iPod to fill out all of the information on iTunes.

This is the perfect golfing application for a serious or casual golfer with an iPhone or iPod Touch. The only features that someone with an iPod Touch wouldn’t be able to access is tracking each shot with GPS (which I’ve yet to try because only select courses have uploaded a satellite image of their course) and obviously clicking on the course’s information in order to call, access their website, or get directions via Google Maps. Buy this application and be the one who volunteers to keep score instead of drawing the short straw.

I was asked just yesterday by a guy who just bought his first iPhone what my favorite app was. My gut initially told me to pick a game, but I knew in my heart that a game would be the wrong choice. Don’t get me wrong, some of the games a great, but there are some apps that just make having the iPhone magical. I thought about some of the fantastic apps that I have and came up with a relatively new app, MLB.com At Bat 2009.

At Bat 2009 has managed to do something that few other apps can claim in the app store… it has managed to make the world seem just a bit smaller. With this app, on my tiny little iPhone, I can listen to any major league baseball broadcast in America. Not only that, but I can choose which teams broadcasting team I want to listen to. While I am listening, I also have access to game stats, pitch-by-pitch statistics, and uploaded video clips of great plays.

The build quality of At Bat ‘09 is quite stellar, with everything working just about like it should at all times. The amazing thing about the radio broadcasts are that they work over any network, 3G or EDGE, without a noticeable drop in sound quality. Milo Hamilton, the announcer of the Houston Astros, my favorite team, sounds amazing, even through the built in iPhone speakers. The on-screen pitch by pitch does lag at times, but no more than catching up with the game on ESPN. When it is on target though, the pitch-by-pitch is amazing because of the interaction with the game. When you hear a radio broadcast complain about a pitch that was out of the strike zone, the pitch-by-pitch screen will show you exactly how close (or far off) the announcer was to making the correct call.

My only real complaint about the quality is when it comes to the video portion. It does work, which is a good thing, but the quality of the picture is pretty bad and the audio and video don’t always match up. It would be nice to also have more clips to view… like one per inning rather than three per game. While I’m at it, I also wish that there were live, streaming broadcasts over WiFi. Ok, I may be asking a lot, but I can dream if I want to. I know the technology is there, or it’s at least close, but the licensing for the games would probably be tough. Someday guys… someday. Being such a small part of the app, I’m not too discouraged by the video, but I do wish some of the aspects of it were better.

While I realize that everyone will not be excited by this app, there are a good chunk of baseball fans that will be quite ecstatic. Baseball is the only sport that I can think of that is almost better over the radio than on TV. It’s a great game, but there are moments in the game that just do not need to be seen pitch for pitch. Fortunately for the sport, there are so many good announcers that I very rarely miss watching on my TV, and have caught myself sitting on my La-Z-Boy with the TV off, listening to games. Even at $9.99, which is admittedly steep for an iPhone app, At Bat 2009 is well worth the money. It’s just one of those apps that will forever change the way you look at and think about the iPhone.

I absolutely can’t wait to get MLB.com At Bat 2010. If any MLB execs are reading this, please add streaming video to the app next year… that would be amazing.

Come this time of year, I am in Sports Nirvana. Along with all of the other games going on right now, college basketball has me ensconced in its adrenaline-fueled embrace, and with March Madness set to begin in just a few days I’m always looking for an edge when it comes to filling out my bracket.

Enter Bracketcast. Bracketcast is an NCAA Basketball tournament prediction application that leverages Accuscore’s number-crunching computers to render the results of each game. When you launch the app, it pulls in Accuscore’s analysis and then displays the winners of each round on separate tabs.

As far as the user interface, the application does a straightforward, albeit lackluster, job of rendering the statistics. Game results are divided into regional tabs along the bottom, and then you can move through each round of the tournament with the buttons at the top. Each page displays a predicted final score for each match-up, as well as odds of victory by percentile. If you feel that a team may pull an upset, you can tap any match-up to switch who will win, and Bracketcast will re-analyze all of the results based on the changes that you’ve made. As the tournament progresses, Bracketcast will update with new results for each successive game.

To get an idea how Accuscore gets their numerical forecasts, here’s a quote from the Accuscore website:

“AccuScore creates virtual players using over 30 different attributes then we put those players on a team which also has attributes such as coaching tendencies, then we let them play a game, one play at a time. We record every possible statistic then repeat the process, 10,000 times. The AccuScore simulation engine even factors in things like wind, rain, snow, field type, injuries. You name it, it’s taken into account.”

Sounds incredible, right?

The main problem I have with the app, however, is its supposed usefulness. As a tool to fill out the office bracket pool, I don’t see this giving you that much of an advantage. Looking over the results that Bracketcast gave me, every single higher-ranked team is predicted to win over every lower-ranked team. If I filled out my bracket based on those statistics, I would be absolutely hammered during the tournament given college basketball’s unpredictable nature. Yes, I understand that you can pick your own upsets within the app, but at that point, I’m going off my own knowledge of the game and intuition anyway, so it seems somewhat pointless to be using statistical probability at that point. In addition, once your brackets are filled out for the office pool, Bracketcast pretty much becomes dead in your hand since I’m sure your office buddies aren’t going to allow you to change your selections.

If you’re using the software to gamble and place bets for each game online or via various established means of betting on sports, then I can see Bracketcast being a tad more useful. However, if you are a serious sports gambler, you probably are already using an online tool to give you an edge anyway. Also, given that there is not much to the app to begin with, the art design could have benefited from some interesting eye candy rather than the bland “hey I just learned the iPhone SDK last week” feel I get from it.

Stay away sports fans – for casual bracketheads this app is useless, and serious gamblers already have better online tools.

Dart Scorer is a, as you would expect from the name, a scoring application for darts. Nicely done app that includes the ability to score x01 games and Cricket.

One of the nice touches this app includes are rules for the games it supports, useful for those inevitable rules questions.

While the controls are fairly well done, you will need to use the undo button fairly often to fix stray touches.

While the app does a great job of scoring cricket, it would be nice if it would support more than 2 players in a single game. Even though it’s traditionally a 2 player or 2 team game, it can be played with more than 2.

Dart Scorer is well done. I’d like to have it with me next time I play darts. Perhaps mounted to the wall next to the dart board. No wait, then it would just be a target for my drunk darts partner.

SportsTap is kind of like having every sports score in the world in your pocket all at once. Well, almost. The SportsTap application in the App Store adds a couple of very good features over the web based application. The application is undergoing constant changes it seems. Things have been improving quickly. There are a couple menus that lead to coming soon type messages. The Premiere League football being one of those and most disappointing to me.

User Interface Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

While the bulk of the SportsTap application seems to just be an embedded Safari browser, there are a couple of convenient features added. For one is a single touch on the LocalTap icon will show you scores from any sport that are near your current position. Quick and easy single-touch access to the scores that you are most likely to want.

There is also the option that allows you to remove sports that you are not interested in by clicking on settings. There is a rather large bug in this though. If you click the settings button while editing the sports it will remove the settings menu option. Seems as though there is no way to get this back. Be careful out there sports fans.

The interface in general is very well done. Easy and quick to navigate even with the large number of sports and scores this application tracks.

Re-use / Replay Value Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Very strong re-use on this. Especially with the Olympics going on — I found myself checking it 2-3 times per day. Once they fix the Premiere League football section, I will be checking even more, I’m sure.

Overall Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

If you are a sports fan, this is a great application. Your usage will determine if the installed App Store version is preferable over the web version. Both are fantastic and worth a look.

Developer: MLB.com
Price: $4.99
Version Reviewed: 1.1

MLB.com At Bat was one of the original iPhone OS applications shown at the Apple keynote announcing the iPhone 3G earlier this year. It raised excitement in MLB fans, and rightly so. This is a fantastic application for baseball fans. A great way to keep up to date on the go with scores and video clips.

When you launch the game you will nearly instantly be shown current scores of games in progress. Very quick to check the score of any game. Click on a game to see the box score at the bottom of the screen. You can swipe to the left or right for yesterdays games and tomorrows games.

For most games in progress and yesterdays games there are video highlights. A nice feature and well implemented. This is a killer feature that launches very quickly when using Wifi and fairly quickly under 3G. Another great feature is a preference (accessed from the System Preferences application) that lets you mark your favorite teams. This will make tracking the scores of those teams much easier.

The interface design in this application is nearly perfect. But even with that great design, the price would be a little high if it weren’t for the video highlights.

Oddly, the designers have offloaded the game details, play by play, line ups, etc. to a very non-iPhone optimized WAP site that opens in Safari.

Overall this is a fantastic application and a must buy for MLB fans. On the downside, the future is unknown. There’s a note on the application description that the MLB will provide this service through the 2008 season. Does that mean that this application will no longer be of use after the fall classic? Only time will tell and still worth it for the remaining part of the season.