App Aims: Green Touch, Green Thumb, Green Earth

Simple, fun, and easy, you can plant a tree straight from your own iPhone or iPod touch without ever having to lift more than a finger, literally! With every iPhorest app purchased a real tree is actually planted along the Gulf coast in the United States. iPhactory in a association with The Conservation Fund and sponsored by Ecolife plant and maintain each tree. How’s that for giving back to Mother Nature?

• Dig a hole by moving the device in a digging motion -until your seedling appears
• Plant the seedling
• Shake the device for a rain storm to water your virtual tree
• When the sun comes your tree will begin to grow
• Then watch your trees’ progression
• Repeating these steps will allow your tree to reach full growth
• Share your tree’s growth at any stage by pressing the share button to email a picture
• Go up to Forest, where you can reset your growth.
• Go up to see all of the other iPhorest users. Help green the Earth - the app places a glowing dot where you first launch iPhorest.

The iPhorest application has an impeccably easy-to-use interface with great interaction features. The graphics are remarkable and being able to take a virtual walk around your tree at any stage during its growth gives it a realistic feel. The rain storm feature fun to have along with watching the sun come out and cause the tree to grow.

You can start growing a new tree at any time during a tree’s progression. One hitch to starting over with a new tree however is that users didn’t get to keep the tree they had just created; the process really begins all over. We’d like to see an update so that once you created a tree you can create a new one and still keep the trees you have previously grown- that way you could grow your own forest. Another interesting idea we found was the option of different trees available to plant and grow.

The developers have an innovative way of displaying their company profile, app information and their support. Tap the down arrow and view the underground root system of the tree- and located among the roots are all of the support systems and information.

All together this app is great not only because it’s fun and easy, but also because of the impact planting a tree has on the environment.