14 DAY TRIAL // Designed by former Apple employee Bill Nguyen, the man behind Lala.com, Color is a new ambitious project that aims to get people to share photos with one another whenever they’re in close proximity running the app.
Albeit rather intrusive, the app warns that you share the information at your own risk.
“Use Color to take photos and videos with other people who have iPhones within 150 ft to create a group album,” the developer explains.
“For parties, play dates, lunch? You get their photos, they get yours. Share any album with Twitter and Facebook,” reads the app’s description. “Color is a social network for your iPhone,” Nguyen concludes.
Users of both iPhones and Android phones can simultaneously use their devices to capture photos, videos, and conversations into a virtual book.
According to Nguyen, there's no attaching, uploading, or friending to do. Users can, however, ‘like’ people as well as comment on their presence.
To make things clear for everyone thinking of downloading and using the app, Color is a completely transparent piece of software, meaning that users don’t log in or out of the service, as they do on Facebook, and there’s no hiding once you’ve fired it up and accepted to let it share your location and receive notifications.
Again, it is worth noting that Color is, by its nature, an intrusive application, but not if you really want others to feel your presence, and see you for what you are.
Undoubtedly, there will be some controversy surrounding the application, not to mention that it’s not off to a very good start.
Functionality-wise, commenters on the U.S. iTunes App Store indicate that Color still needs a lot of polishing up, from the UI’s lack of intuitiveness to multiple crashes experienced by some users.
Since Color is still taking its first baby steps, we can trust Bill Nguyen to give its code a quick refresh.
In our experience with the app, running on an iPhone 4 with iOS 4.2.1 installed, Color ran smooth, although we agree the interface could do more to make the user understand its functionality.
Since Color is free, you can download it and try it out right now.