Veu - City Explorer for iOS creates an on-the-fly travel guide
Veu (free) is a clever iOS app that unfortunately has some quirks and rough edges. The app -- which is designed to be an on-the-fly travel guide -- has coverage for the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy and details for several major cities. It claims 27,000,000 points of interest, but those POIs are based on interactions with databases like Foursquare and Wikipedia.
Veu generally works rather well. The app figures out your current location, or you can manually type in a location. Sometimes there are a lot of hits for places found near the location, and you can click on a place to get directions through Apple Maps or see reviews from Foursquare. Veu also grabs local images to dress up the screen.
Results are a bit uneven, though. London, England showed a lot of places to see and provided reviews of restaurants galore, but Scottsdale, Arizona -- positively crawling with things to do and places to dine -- showed only 2 locations. Once you are on the Apple Maps screen, there is no way to get back to Veu -- you have to exit the map and start Veu up again. The map should be embedded in the app instead. If you are in or enter a location Veu can't create a guide for, the app just stalls trying to find some POIs. There is no exit; you just have to shut the app down. I'm sure the developer could find a way to make a more graceful exit.
Veu is ad supported, and while I have no problem with that as a concept, it's yet another app that uses constantly- changing animated screens that are an evil distraction. Developers should be happy to deliver an ad, then cut the rest of the crap.
Veu is worth a look, but it's not as handy as better apps like Around Me or Where To? I think there is potential here, but the data is not deep enough to be totally reliable and useful.
Veu requires iOS 7.1. It's optimized for the iPhone 5. Veu is meh, but it has some ideas, even though they aren't very well executed.
