There are many apps in the iTunes App Store today–some of which are useful, some of which are just plain fun, and others of which are mostly pointless. Jigsaw for iPhone ($1.99) falls firmly into the third category. I may be doing it wrong, but I just can’t figure out why you would pay $2 to make one of your pictures into a puzzle that you can’t solve.
The app itself is easy to use and navigate — or, more accurately, there isn’t a whole lot of substance to the app. Launch the app, and it will take you to a demo screen, which plays one of their preloaded pictures. You can then load a photo from your album and play with it in the form of a jigsaw puzzle. When I first downloaded the app, I thought that it would be a game where you could load one of your pictures and turn it into a puzzle that you then had to solve. This, however, is not the case. From what I have gathered, the entire purpose of the app is to take an image and turn it into another image that looks like a jigsaw puzzle in various stages of completion. This idea in and of itself has potential within other apps, however the mechanics of this app are poor at best.
When editing the image in puzzle form, you can either move the pieces individually — or skew the image on a three-dimensional plane; the functionality in a photo editing program would be the “stretch and skew” option. Here, the four corners of the photo are highlighted, and you can grab them and move them on a three dimensional plane, thereby skewing the image. The pieces can be put back in their original place by simply tapping the place they once occupied. Even if you did have the idea of using your image as a puzzle to solve you would be unable to do so, because the image will simply reassemble itself when you tap a piece of the puzzle. In theory the mechanics sound as though they should work, but it ends up feeling clunky and difficult to maneuver.
Overall, I could never truly find a reason to purchase this app. If I had the desire to make my pictures into a jigsaw puzzle, I would want to at least be able to solve the puzzles. Since this is not possible within this app, I can’t see any practical applications whatsoever, and could never justify the $1.99 cost of an app with the sole purpose of making an image look like a puzzle. It seems as though the developers supplied a solution to a problem that didn’t exist. Unless you are dying to find out what your images will look like as a jigsaw puzzle, there is no need to purchase this app.
