Fresh AIR Apps

Albelli is an online photobook creator much like iPhoto that allows you to order real books from your own digital photos.

The application can access your photos from a variety of online services like: Flickr, photobucket, smugmug and Picasa web albums as well as images from your local hard machine. Accessing the photos you want to build your album from is via a seperate window to the main application. After authentication you can the drag each required image across into the main app window.

There appears to be quite a number of pre-set page layouts and I didn’t find a way to create a new one from sratch. There are options for setting different backgrounds, and the colour of the cover and title. Each page can have a different layout and background if you so desire.

I have not ordered a book using this application so it would be interesting to see what the final product is like.

Design eye

The application appears to be half completed from a design persepctive. The main app window has had some light cosmetic treatment like buttons and a striking orange border. Still you can’t help feeling that any UI work was well down on the list of priorities, esopecially when you compare the likes of online Flex editors Picknik and Splashup. The secondary window for selecting your photos from online services looks very much like standard Flex ‘halo’ theme.

The UI also feels a little clunky, and I think they could benefit from some more interaction design. That said it is labelled as a beta so hopefully things will improve as they move forward. They could do a lot worse that look at how Scrapblog is handling an application of a simliar nature.

Technical eye

The application is built using Adobe Flex,. What I did notice was that the application appears to have language support for the US, UK and the Netherlands.