The confluence of the iPhone and Schlafly, St. Louis' flagship independent brewery -- in the form of the appropriately named "Schlafly Beer App" or the "Schl-App" for short -- should be cause for celebration. But the application, developed by Grey Swan (also locally based) and released in early April, is a dud.
How so? Let's take it from the top.
"Home," an image of a tasty-looking pint, has little purpose beyond making you thirsty. Running along the top of the screen are a series of buttons leading you out of the application, to sections of the Schlafly website or your own Facebook and Twitter pages. What's the concept behind downloading someone's app, opening it and being sent away?
Perplexingly, Schlafly's contact info has been dispersed to different sections of the application. For example, if you are looking for the address or a map to either the Tap Room or the Bottleworks, they're hidden at the bottom of the "On Tap" tab. While this might make perfect sense after a pint or three, to the sober mind it's confusing. This is surprising, because Schlafly has generally done a good job with its website. It's clean, simple, usually quite intuitive and carries the Schlafly brand image from the land of bricks to the realm of clicks effectively.
The content contained within the "Newsletter" and "Events" sections is essentially redeployed web pages from the Schlafly site or, worse, direct links to that content. An exception is the "Our Beers" section, which includes more information about each beer style than appears on the website. While it's nice to have the brewer's notes regarding process, malts and yeast strains, you have to click/touch/slide multiple times to get to it (versus a single click on the website).
There's a lot to be said for building something once and using it multiple times, but iPhone applications that are simply encapsulated versions of a website and some associated RSS feeds have become wearisome. In order to be useful, applications should have a function, and this is where the Schlafly app falls short. This is less a shot at Schlafly and more of a critique of the vast majority of applications available for the iPhone. Apps of this kind are more novelties than tools that meet -- or, better yet, create -- a need.
In the end this one's reminiscent of the old adage: "Just because you can doesn't mean you should."
