Mockups by Balsamiq is a great innovative application for all those who are involved in software, web or RIA design and development. Balsamiq is a new company headed by ex Adobe employee Giacomo Guilizzoni (people call him Peldi) so the expectations are high.

In it’s simplest form Mockups is a replacement for the application developers notebook, however that is where the similarity ends. Mockups has a rich UI library for the most common interface elements. These elements are intentionally hand drawn so that the result always looks fresh and rough, so that people don’t get too attached.

Mockups feels like you are drawing, but it’s digital, so you can tweak and rearrange controls easily, and the end result is much cleaner. Teams can come up with a design and iterate over it in real-time in the course of a meeting.

I really liked using Mockups and although I didn’t use it in anger on a real project it was fast and fun. The selection and transformation of items on the canvas works just like you would expect coming from any graphics app. You can multiple select and resize which is just so nice and like a usual desktop application.

Design eye

On first glance the application UI looks a bit strange and I’m not sure about the horizontal scrolling of the object panel, thoughts of scrolling left and right all the time didn’t sound great. This is where the quick add functionality works well, just by typing in the input box.

I would have liked the option to just have a white background instead of the picture of a notebook. I can see the visual cue to why it is there but the novelty soon wore off. Also in future versions having a palette arrangement like Photoshop or Illustrator could possibly work better for the more serious designer. Those opinions aside the Baslamiq Mockups is a solid AIR application and one that you just need to try. I can see this being actively developed in the future with input from the community.

Information This is a commercial product and some features are disabled with the trial version. Apologies for the oversight I should have made that clear in the review, sorry for any confusion. The latest prices and concessions can be seen over at Balsamiq Mockups site.

Tagged with: prototyping, UI, UX

Advertise here on the freshAIRapp feed and get noticed. Find out more.

DestroyFlickr might sound like a frightful Adobe AIR application to run on your machine. Wow it can destroy Flickr I thought! Well according to Jonnie Hallman of DestroyToday,

To destroy today is to make the most of the day—destruction as a form of creation. This is my carpe diem.

So DestroyFlickr is intended to make the most of Flickr, and it goes along way towards that goal. The application and Jonnie’s homepage have a great look to them and he is obviously aware of how to convey information clearly and without cluter. The primary objective of the AIR application is to provide a better less messy way to navigate Flickr.

As with all Flickr applications you have to authorise DestroyFlickr to access your account. After passing the authentication you are presented with a profile page showing your recent uploads and those of your contacts. The navigation is unconventionally at the bottom but once you have used it for a while it works quite well and stays out of the way.

The photos are well laid out, although I’m not sure about the random skewing personally preferring non rotated images. Rolling over an image shows a tooltip and smooth animation to straighten the image. Selecting will scroll the interface across to the photo screen or workspace. The photo screen is direct and clear even enabling a larger view of the photo if required and any meta data.

This is one of the first AIR applications I have seen that has really good online documentation with screenshots. This is only available from the apps website and I didn’t see a direct link within the AIR app.

There are many features in this application and it’s best to just explore. You can upload photos, edit your picture info and search other users and pictures.

Workspaces for different Flickr accounts is a really nice feature. I liked the way you can skip through the gallery pages by clicking and dragging on the page number. It’s those little details that make a great AIR application.

Design eye

The dark theme is nice and very Lightroom inspired. However there is no custom chrome and the window size is fixed, so no full screen view. Having a good fullscreen experience with this app I think would be a major addition in the future.

Clear typography and layout, as mentioned previously I would like to toggle the option of having the photos rotated or not.

Technical eye

My guess is that this is built with Flash not Flex and uses the Flickr API extensively.
This AIR app is built using ActionScript 3 and the Flex Builder IDE. There is an extensive custom display framework that enables dynamic asset and graphic creation entirely through code.

Tagged with: flickr, productivity

Advertise here on the freshAIRapp feed and get noticed. Find out more.

Well what can I say about the new Pandora desktop application built with Adobe AIR ? Err not alot really because due to silly rights issues anyone outside of the US of A can’t access Pandora let alone the desktop app.

So if you have a few words and possibly a screenshot of the Pandora AIR application then send it over to me and i’ll post it up and give you full credit for helping a poor European developer out.

Update Thanks to Chris for sending me the screenshots.

Tagged with: music

Advertise here on the freshAIRapp feed and get noticed. Find out more.

This is an impressive AIR application right from the outset. Even more so when you realise that it was not developed by a large organisation but by just a single guy, Matt Giger. It is the realisation of a 5 year old dream so congratulations Matt.

If you have used Google Earth before then this is very similar in many ways, Matt has his own opinions on the Google product. A 3d globe that you can zoom in and rotate around. Like GE you can then add overlays on top of the globe to show data from various sources like weather and cloud patterns, grids and many more.

Clicking on data points like cities can show information like the weather forecast in a floating window over the globe. I found the night shadow feature to be interesting seeing where on the globe was currently in darkness or daylight.

If you have any overlay data in KML format then dragging and dropping the KML file over the app will load the data in to EarthBrowser.

Being in AIR EarthBrowser comes with built in web browser and can be seamlessly updated from the web when new versions are released. It is shareware and occasionally a window appears giving you the option to purchase in addition to the demo watermarks on the globe. So if you like the AIR app go and show your support by purchasing a license to help fund further development. Apparently Apple co-founder Steve ‘Woz’ Wozniak was the 11th person to purchase the app.

I will say that it can appear to be quite slow when rotating the globe. I’m not sure if this is an AIR of a Flash player issue but it definitely is not as smooth as Google Earth in that respect. This is a minor comment and would not affect the general usage of the AIR app.

Design eye

In my opinion the UI does look a bit cheap and an after thought. To compete at this level with a shareware product I would say to Matt that he should hire a good UI person just to get a more professional polish to the app.

There must be a better way of displaying the data set layers than is shown. I know that most GIS systems like Google and ESRI use a very similar expanding tree and check box system so there is a commonality there but I can’t help thinking it can be done so much better.

Technical eye

Built using Flash and ActionScript 3. Matt did not use Papervision3D instead opting to create his own 3d framework. Automatic updates and drag and drop KML file operations.

Tagged with: productivity, fun, maps

Advertise here on the freshAIRapp feed and get noticed. Find out more.

Firstly a confession, I can’t properly run this application as it requires you to be located in the US and register with Pizza Hut using a valid ZIP code. So this review will be very light on content. If you have an opinion and would like to review this on my behalf just send the review into me using the contact page.

The idea of the application is good and it is one way of bringing this large brand onto a users desktop. What advantage it has over the normal webpage is not clear to me. Obviously you can locally save you favourite pizza order for easy retrieval.

Apparently the app sets itself to load automatically at bootup, probably to try and tempt you into buying a pizza everytime you turn on your computer. That would be one way of making me uninstall this application.

Oh and the first thing that will annoy you is that the AIR badge installer is not present on the application webpage, you have to click a link and then a popup window appears containing the Flash AIR badge installer. What kind of crazy loon thought that up?

Design eye

You will not find many RIA features here and again the text is really small, WHY? Just make it legible please. The tie in with the Pizza Hut brand is clear and it does look impressive on the desktop using the chromeless window option. The shortcut application icons look good too, something that can often get overlooked in a rush to release an AIR app.

Technical eye

Built using Flash and little imagination, that’s about all.

Tagged with: fun, us-only

Advertise here on the freshAIRapp feed and get noticed. Find out more.

AOL Top 100 videos is a feature rich desktop application written in Adobe AIR. A music app that showcases the 100 hottest music videos plus related artist videos and special features.

“With our Adobe AIR application, we can reach communities of users with compelling, free content available from AOL,” says Sun Sachs, director of AOL’s interactive design and development team.

Firstly the app looks professionally finished and looks great on the desktop. When first loaded you can select a video genre or the most watched. Now you can choose from a collection of music videos to watch and the UI offers both an icon or list view of the available tracks. When rolling the cursor over a video icon a tool tip appears and if you leave it for a second will start to scroll the track and artist name, very nice.

Selecting a video jumps you to a new view with the video on the left with standard controls including a view options of fullscreen, sidebar widget or select view. On a larger monitor the fullscreen option is pointless and so pixelated you’ll be hitting escape rather quickly to return you to the standard view.

Artist information appears on the right with artworks rating and purchase links it also fetches any recent photos and new of the artist. If the playing video has related videos they are displayed in the bottom panel with star rating. The setting panel is informative and easily visualises what options are currently set by highlighting them in green which is the apps action colour.

The app UI is responsive and gives good feedback with the various tooltips and animations. That said, you will need a really top notch net connection to watch the videos without them stuttering or just stopping while the streaming catches up. I’m on a 4mb connection and I could not play a single video all the way through without hitting problems. Also there are many videos that are unavailable, I guess this is because I’m located outside the US although it does not explicitly state a reason.

Design eye

Nice contrasting colours with clear iconography and text with only slight hint of web 2.0 highlights. The smaller side view animates nicely between the select view and the scrolling tooltips are cool.

Technical eye

Built using Flex and Flash, AOL was one of the first larger corporations to be developing powerful desktop based web apps using Adobe AIR.

Tagged with: music, video

Advertise here on the freshAIRapp feed and get noticed. Find out more.

Do you remember the futuristic touch wall UI from the Minority Report? Well this AIR app with have you addicted for hours just playing with the interface.

UvLayer is a social video application where you can discover, watch, collect and share video media. Searching currently focuses on videos from YouTube and Truveo (which searches videos from across the web).

Drag and drop video thumbnails from the search results window to your canvas, put them on top of each other or lasso them. Now be the DJ and play them as a playlist!

What makes this video sharing site special, apart from the UI, is that by logging into your Facebook, Google Talk or AIM account you can drag and share videos with your friends.

When your search results appear they arrive as small tiles and fan out across the virtual desktop. Creating stacks is as easy as dragging one tile ontop of other existing tiles, this stack can then be named and stored. As you start using the app further you realise you can keep existing searches and the associated results as a grouped folder. Then just for fun throw it across the desktop and watch it slide!

Video playback is handled by internal player that appears when a video tile is clicked. You can start to play numerous videos at once. Mini thumbnails appear at the end of a video for related videos.

I can’t help but compare the interaction to that of the TileUI experiment by Doug McCune. TileUI uses the Papervision3D engine to give the app an even better 3d desktop feel. I would love to see a hybrid of these two in a future app.

If you are a heavy user of Facebook and like sharing lots of videos with your friends then this app is perfect for you. Alternatively just watch and throw tiles around, I guarantee you’ll have fun.

Design eye

I like the design, colours and interactions on this app. Purely because it is different to the other video AIR apps out there. What is interesting is that the user creates there own UI out of video assets, UvLayer just provides the tools to make that possible. This possibly shows the way in which future apps could develop, where the UI is enhanced by a users content.

Using tiles was a great idea and the hub of the whole application.

Technical eye

The primary application is built using Adobe Flex.

Tagged with: video, youtube

Advertise here on the freshAIRapp feed and get noticed. Find out more.

FLVplay is another AIR application in the desktop video player market.

This application only currently searches YouTube for content which you can do by entering keywords or a specific username. This is quite restrictive given the competition like Ubuket and MooFlair.

The application is responsive and simply laid out you might just like it.

You can download your chosen YouTube video directly from within the app by clicking the folder icon in the video meta details area. I think a more obvious icon would be better suited here, unless they are aiming to keep it a small hidden extra for those who like to click around a UI.

Design eye

Clean simple UI. I liked the live reflection from the video playing window very Apple.

I found the scrollbars to be a little small and tricky given the overall size of the application. Also the search window when docked had no obvious icon or text indicating that I needed to press it so that it would open again for me to do another search.

Technical eye

Built using Adobe Flex 3.

Tagged with: youtube, video

Advertise here on the freshAIRapp feed and get noticed. Find out more.

Ah the Google Analytics reporting tool by Nicholas Lierman, how could I not have reviewed this before! Well I have been using it over the last few weeks while monitoring the stats of freshAIRapps and my blog giving it a damn good test.

This is another application that has been doing the rounds since the early days of the AIR beta so just like the eBay desktop application, bugs are getting ironed out and new features added. The GA reporting suite is currently up to version 0.51 and labelled as beta 3 although from his blog it looks like release version 1.0 is not far off.

I saw Nicholas give a great presentation at this years FITC in Amsterdam titled ‘Data visualization with Flex and AIR’. He showed the reporting suite and gave a look at how he was working with data from Google Analytics.

Just like ReadAIR with Google Reader, there is no publicly available API for Analytics so Nicholas started from scratch in ActionScript 3. He dissected the JavaScript and calls the web app was making and then recreated the logic inside his own API. That is crazy! Apparently Nicholas is now working alongside some of the Google guys and an ActionScript 3 GA API might well be on the cards for the future.

I really like this application. It is fast responsive and gives me advantages over using the web application provided by Google. One of the advantages of AIR is I can save out my analytics data into PDF, Excel or XML format from any data view.

When you select a view option from the menu it populates a new tab on the main screen. This aides usability by giving the user the option of quickly switching back to previously viewed data and states.

Some small things I don’t like. If I am part way through viewing my analytics data and select ‘manage profiles’ the choose to simply ‘go back’, I have to still select the profile I was viewing which loses all of my open tabs. It looks like it starts a new dashboard session.

The site overlay feature was very complex to achieve says Nicholas but I think he has pulled it off extremely well and with a single click another tab appears showing your site overlayed with click data.

Another thing, when a graph is shown on the main screen if I choose to display another option from the drop down menu like Average Time on Site. When the menu closes it still says visits as the selected option even though I am actually viewing something else. Paying attention to the small details will make for a better allround user experience.

Don’t let this detract from the fantastic work that Nicholas has put into this great AIR application for Google Analytics. Give this a try and I don’t think you will go back to the web app any time soon.

Design eye

The app looks great with obvious design elements taken directly from the Google web based analytics app. This enables existing users to jump right in and start using the app.

I love the smooth transitions when you change graph data, yes I know that it is default Flex but it just adds to the extra value you get by running this AIR application.

The data is presented well and only on a few occasions did I experience unwanted scrollbars on some data rows.

From one of Nicholas’ blog posts it seems that themes could make it into the next release as he was gauging opinions on a dark theme. Some interesting opinions in the comments about the comparison between the dark and light themes options.

Technical eye

Built using Adobe Flex 3 with a custom built ActionScript 3 API for Google Analytics. The application makes use of Flex’s charting engine.

Tagged with: analytics, productivity

Advertise here on the freshAIRapp feed and get noticed. Find out more.

Shrink-O-Matic is a little AIR app by the same guy that did Webkut. Basically you drag and drop images onto the large area then they get resized using the main settings at the top.

There is nothing major here and to be honest it’s just a bit of fun and would be a perfect idea for someone learning AIR with Flash, to replicate the functionality here as a learning exercise. You would be better off just using a photoshop action or Fireworks batch process to do the job. I did find the image quality to be a bit fluffy.

Just see it as a bit of fun.

Design eye

You can’t fault the bold design on this guys apps and website. The bright bold logo and typography work well. The UI is clear with three main sections; Output size, output file name and output file format.

Technical eye

Built using Flash some of the code used in the app is made available on Google code here.

Tagged with: designer

Advertise here on the freshAIRapp feed and get noticed. Find out more.