A Life of Failure: FML Official Review

For anyone who has ever felt like feigning work from their imprisoned cubicle FML is there to help.  FML has become a phenomenon of time wasting, only matched by parallel sites like Epic Fail and Texts from Last Night.  It is on FML people tell their own stories of life failures, twisting things up at the end to add humor to their common tragedy.  Cell phone applications have often been based around casual time wasting, so an FML iPhone application is just logical.  The only thing that FML has to do to port their web content to the iPhone successfully is make the content accessible to this platform specifically and try to utilize the iPhone's features to maximize that.  Thankfully it does both fairly successfully.

What makes the FML website most successful is that you can scroll from one entry to another quickly without having to change pages.  When you start at the Recents page you can can see several entries at once, so you really do not have to think about interacting with the touch screen too much.  You actually get several on one page, so you can easily read a few while pretending to schedule in meetings at work.  The Featured tab brings the same format and allows you to select those Featured by specific time periods.  We also have Random, which is exactly the same thing as the previous two.  It does begin to look like the FML free iPhone application developers were simply looking for ways to add more "content" by finding different ways to organize the same material.  This is somewhat unnecessary, but it does not really hinder FML because the content remains just as solid all the way around. 

Setting Favorites is one of the more unnecessary features for the FML free iPhone application.  How often is someone's life just so terribly funny that you have to return to it again and again?  Again, it does not really strip the application of its use so it is really just a minor addition that a few people may find useful in some mild way. 

The real depth beyond the basic stream of FML entries is in the More tab.  Here you start with the Submit Your FML that allows you a complete entry interface where you can type in the ironic summary of your own catastrophe.  This is only successful because it is actually really easy to use and makes typing in items on the iPhone more practical than the way most applications utilize input.  FML is a completely user built content stream so this addition will actually assist the FML hub entirely by giving more ways that content can be shared.  At the same time it will likely lead to even shorter posts, but there is always a duality to technological additions.

You can easily get to the Moderate section in the More tab that allows you to give Yes or No responses to the posts.  This is done in a way that maintains the ease of use, but few people want to interact with FML enough to actually vote on things.

There are other elements like Illustrated FML that gives you funny pictures to be associated with the mini-blog entries.  These are nice, but take longer to load up and are regulated to single entries on the page.  International gives foreign language settings, but it is not as easily accessible as the English language sections and would somewhat marginalize foreign language contributions.  The one thing that could be added to FML Official is more use of the iPhone's actual internal functions.  It does allow for Push interpretations of streaming content, but do you really want FML entries pushed on you?  If you think that this is pressing news then you probably have more important issues to deal with.

The new FML Official free iPhone application is a nicely updated version of the application and may warrant a re-download for those who have the previous versions stuck on their iPhone.  Ad support is never optimum on your iPhone applications, but it is better than the alternative that would force users to pay for FML.  Try to ignore these as they usually do not get in the way as long as you look where you put your fingers on the touch screen.  Today, I hit a banner ad and got stuck on Free Credit Report for half an hour.  FML.

FML at the iTunes' App Store