Quotationary is a quotation reference app, and since it mainly deals with words, I’m not going to mince mine. The app isn’t very good.
If you’re a casual user, you may not notice things such as duplicate entries or sloppy punctuation. In fact, many of the iTunes reviews for this app seem to be positive. Maybe those folks don’t care about accuracy. I do.
From what I’ve seen, too many of Quotationary’s entries have errors such as obvious typos, comma splices and missing or inconsistent punctuation. Even the accuracy of attribution for some entries is suspect. I actually saw Yogi Berra’s “Baseball is 90 percent mental. The other half is physical,” attributed to “Unknown.” What the heck is that all about? Does this app take me seriously?
Seeing errors such as that make me wonder about the source material. Where are the quotations coming from? Does anybody check them? What, exactly, am I paying for here?
This kind of sloppiness is pervasive throughout the app. The Search function is wonky. Trivia is half-baked (how is the game supposed to end?). Even the text-to-speech function is a disappointment. Yes, it reads quotations aloud, but the robot reader’s Stephen Hawkings-like diction offers none of the inflection or emotion that can help bring a quote to life.
So far, the only things in this app that have worked without fail are the shake gesture for generating new quotes on the Random page and the Mail Quote function for sending quotations to contacts in your Address Book.
What I want from my quotations app are good, reliable quotations. This app doesn’t have them. I’m taking a pass.
