The Open Championship iPhone App & Desktop Widget

by Patrick Altoft on July 13, 2009 / one response

With on a few days until The Open kicks off I’ve been looking round the official site to see what interesting features they have planned. The desktop widget caught my eye and I went to download landing page hoping to install a desktop gadget or Adobe Air app to show the latest open news all week.

Unfortunately I get something that needs to be embedded into a 3rd party site rather than a desktop app and it seems everybody else is just as unhappy. Out of the 14,528 people who have visited that page only 188 have actually installed it!

Here are some of the comments on the download page:

This thing is a desaster. You cannot install it on your computer as a desktop application. You can just integrate it in other kind of nonsense noene uses.

WHY CANT U DOWNLOAD IT, THIS IS RIDICULOUS!!!!!!!!!! I COULD DO A BETTER JOB MYSELF, CALL URSELF PROFESSIONALS, U SHULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELF!! LOOL

Agreed, totally useless, the R&A, as the name suggests, are living in the past

In the (famous) words of a great from another sport … “you cannot be serious!!” Being able to download it would be a start. Why not find some nine-year-old at Turnberry – he or she would be a better job than this.

Start programming now and maybe you’ll finish up with something better for St. Andrews in 2010… )

The Twitter feed looks OK (probably because they have sensibly handed it over it to top amateur golfer Gordon Stevenson) and has lots of pictures so probably best to grab that instead.

There is an iPhone app which leaves a LOT to be desired, the news is scraped from the website and not even formatted for the iPhone. Videos don’t play as you would expect and aside from about 5 apparently fake reviews in the App Store (probably from the developers) there are a few people being highly critical.

If you are going to bother doing an iPhone app and releasing a widget then why not take the time to do it properly? The event is on every year so why not just do it right?

Oh and don’t even get me started on the Rolex popup ads on the tee times page.

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Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.