iKnow Dogs review

Man’s best friend has been domesticated for so long, the species has had ample time to differentiate into the astounding number of breeds in existence today. It can get a little overwhelming, but Alphablind Studios is striving to present them to you in one little app: iKnow Dogs.

iKnow Dogs lists all 164 American Kennel Club (AKC) dog breeds, along with over 700 pictures of these breeds (in both adult and puppy form). You can scroll down the alphabetically-ordered list, or search for a specific by tapping on the magnifying glass icon in the upper right corner. Tap on a breed to open its profile, and you’ll be greeted by a photo; flick left and right to scroll through the photos (double-tap to save the photo). If you flick up and down, you can see the breed’s basic stats, separated into Appearance, Characteristics, and a General Description. Under Characteristics, the breed is rated on aspects such as Energy Level, Friendliness, Exercise, Grooming, etc. If you want to know more, links leading to Wikipedia and the AKC website are provided down at the bottom of the profile.

If you want to look at all the breeds fitting a certain requirement, you can filter the list by Appearance, AKC Group, Temperament, and Country of Origin–just tap on the green arrow at the bottom of the main breeds list to bring up the filters. This function would probably be most useful for people looking for a breed to adopt; another function they might enjoy is ability to put a breed on the Favorites list by tapping and filling their heart marks in both the dictionary and profile view.

Let’s face it: anything involving puppies has an unfair advantage over everything else. Even with that, iKnow Dogs is a great app to have, especially for a beginner or someone with a casual interest. It is very well organized, with an intuitive layout and facts that are delivered quick-‘n-easy. Unfortunately, the development process may have been a little too fast, as there is the occasional misplaced photograph (some of them definitely not professionally done) and even some misinformation. To those who seriously want to research dog breeds, I would recommend reading this app’s information with a grain of salt and taking a look at AKC’s website (http://www.akc.org)–or even better, a published guidebook…not Wikipedia. However, for this amount of information, $2.99 seems a fair price, and puppies make everything better!

AppSafari Rating: 3.5/5

AppSafari review of iKnow Dogs was written by Julie Guan on April 22nd, 2010 and categorized under App Store, Education. Page viewed 4042 times, 1 so far today. Need help on using these apps? Please read the Help Page.