Hasta La Ideas

We’ve all seen wallcharts a-plenty – actually, we’ve just been filling in the latest World Cup match stats into our wall chart of choice (kindly sent to us by benjaminprescott.co.uk) – but in this day and age, it’s unsurprising to learn that there are various interactive apps floating around that give you all the typical who, when and where wallchart-type info – and more besides. The Sun and The Telegraph have already released iPhone apps relating to the World Cup – as has The Times, which is also about to unleash its “interactive World Cup planner” as a feature within its iPad app…

Designed by Applied Works, the new iPad app allows users to look through the various stages of the competition to find out the scores from the various matches and see the times and locations of matches yet to be played.

Users can also click on any fixture to make player cards appear for each player in both teams involved in that particular match. Each card shows a player from that nation’s squad. Select the player and the card flips round to reveal top trump style World Cup stats. For example, should I want to have a look at the squads for Italy and Paraguay (who played last night), then the following screen would come up:

And if you don’t have an iPad – you can still use the app on your computer screen – providing, of course, you’re a signed up user of thetimes.co.uk. The online version works in exactly the same way as the in-app version – only you use your mouse to select stuff, rather than your finger…

As a wallchart replacement, this is pretty good – and it fills itself in. Handy. But it seems like an opportunity missed that there isn’t an option to link through to videos of the goals from matches that have already been played.

If you do want an app that you can access each played game’s goals and match highlights, you should check out the free ITV1 2010 FIFA World Cup iPhone app. The app also allows users access to live video coverage of matches. Very nice.

Hang on a moment – what’s this? Creative Review’s very own iPad has just been delivered to the office. Cue much excitement… If we’re a bit quiet on the blog front for the rest of the day – you can guess why!