RefreshingApps.com

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.