Could be better, poorly executed – Mineral Quiz for iPad Review

There's a piece of common wisdom about mineral identification, which is that visual identifications are almost always useless. Obviously, some minerals are so distinctive that a picture alone suffices, but that is relatively uncommon. Unfortunately, this app relies solely on the user being able to select one of four options to match a picture. There are no other clues: no hardness, no mass or specific gravity, no acid reactivity, no magnetism, no radioactivity, no streak. If the user enters the wrong choice more than twice, the correct chemical formula is displayed - that's it. The photographs are odd too. Some, like the sphalerite and the pyrite, don't really represent characteristic habits for the mineral, which makes identification far more difficult. At least one, the molybdenite, is a photo I've seen before elsewhere. And the stibnite photo was also atypical compared to how one most commonly sees that mineral. Overall, the photos are pretty, if on the dark side, and of fairly good quality. Chemical families represented are extremely limited. The vast majority of the fifty here are sulfides (that is, minerals which are composed chemically of metal ions bonded to sulfur ions, pyrite, for example, is an iron sulfide): there are a few silicates, one or two oxides, and that's it, as far as i recall. This could be due to the fact that many sulfide minerals are visually distinctive, lending themselves to this quiz format. However, it in no way represents the diversity of the mineral kingdom, and if there's a future update, it should address this. As far as the app itself, it's pretty crude and has only limited functionality. When you complete the fifty item quiz, you are given the option to reset and start again or to look at other apps. When you reset, the order of the slides is shuffled, and you start again. It appears that there are only fifty slides to be identified. There is, unfortunately, no sense that this was made by anyone who loves either programming or minerals. On the plus side, it's cheap and will given experienced rockhounds a run for their money identifying sulfides. However, if you're looking for something to give a broad survey of minerals for identification, look elsewhere.
Review by SonicScrewdriver on Mineral Quiz for iPad.