And now for something completely different. An app review. No, I’m not going all tech blog or anything, this app is called Vapor + and it’s a utility for vapers.
There’s just a handful of features available with this app, with the developer promising more down the road. Functionality includes a simple e-liquid mixing calculator, an ohm calculator, a vaping savings calculator and links to a few resources. The easiest way to break this review down is to go through each feature via screen shots and captions.
Ohms Calculator
The resistance calculator allows you to input resistance in ohms and volts and it will return the power output in watts as well as the load in amps for the given resistance and voltage. There are sliders next to the ohms and volts selections allowing you to freeze the entry while playing around with the other entry.
Unfortunately, you can’t enter power in watts or amperage to get calculations for resistance or voltage. For example, you can’t use it to figure out how many volts you would need with a 2.0 ohm cartomizer to get to 11 watts.
There is a handy link to the battery safety section of Phil Busardo’s blog as well.
e-Liquid Mixing Calculator
The e-liquid calculator has fields for the nicotine strength of your base, desired level percentages of flavorings desired amount. For some reason, it leaves it up to you to figure out how many drops per ml. I believe the general rule of thumb is 20. It would have been nice for it to have that as a default starting point. There’s also no explicit level for PG percentage. Rather it assumes your base is 100% PG and gives you an option for setting your desired VG level. The final calculation then suggests how much VG to add to the PG base to get there.
Another negative is there is only one flavor percentage spot. So you can’t really make complex recipes with this app. It does give you the ability to save your recipe for later, which is handy.
Savings Calculator
Vapor+ has the obligatory savings calculator as well. The main screen shows you the amount of time you’ve been off smokes and your various savings. To personalize the screen, you hit the preferences button.
You plug in how many packs of smokes you burnt through in a week, price per pack and even pack quantity (again there should be a default of 20 here). It then does a running total. Unfortunately, this part has possibly the most frustrating thing for me that I hope will get fixed in a future version. Rather than a date picker for your quit date, it’s a text field. I have yet to figure out how to type the date and time in correctly to get it to use my quit date. Instead it just goes back to the default, which is when you installed the app. I really hope they change this to some sort of date picker in the next version.
Links
The final page is a collection of links to various web resources. The links go to places like ECF, Vapor Joes and a few of the more popular YouTube reviewers.
There’s also a shopping section that has a few merchants like V2 Cigs and FastTech. It appears that those are affiliate links. Obviously, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with affiliate links, I’m all for people making a couple bucks when they provide something of use to others, but it doesn’t appear that information is disclosed anywhere. It’s not going to really bother most people, but it’s probably worth noting.
The last page is a link to the creator’s blog with some information about the app. I’ll skip that screenshot.
Final thoughts
At this point, the app feels like it has a good basic foundation, but needs to have some more utility built into it. There are also some irksome UI issues like the date field, I also feel like I should be able to swipe between screens, but you have to hit the icons at the bottom to get to each screen.
Vapor+ is available in the iTunes App Store for 99 cents. That’s listed as a sale price with the regular price being $1.99. I look forward to the next incarnation of the app to see what they can build onto the foundation already in place. There’s some good features there, but it does seem a little rough around the edges, particularly for a paid app.
