If you have 5 minutes to kill then get Earthscape for your iPhone and have a bit of a wander around our mother Earth. The globe spins, zooms and you can even get a horizon view as opposed to the top-down view. It isn’t terribly practical without a search but it is one of the more beautiful and awe-inspiring apps for the iPhone.
Delivery Status Touch is a beautifully designed app. for the iPhone that provides package tracking for UPS, FedEx, ParcelForce, DHL and many others. I love the way each company is given a different look. The simple and clear graphics make it easy to quickly check-up on multiple packages. It also links up with a Mac OS X Dashboard widget and lest you worry about typing tracking numbers into the iPhone you can forward them on from your main computer.
Songbird is your web-browser mashed up with iTunes. The idea is to blur the barrier between music on the web and music on your desktop. If you have ever visited a music website and gone through downloading music files and importing them into iTunes then you’ll know it isn’t as seamless as it could be. Finding music on the web can be a chore too, often in many different formats and presentations. Songbird should make this a better experience.
I’ve been following Songbird for awhile now hoping that it would evolve to meet its promise. In public beta form now it is pretty set in stone and I can no longer continue hoping it will improve. My two main criticisms are that it is slow and that it is cluttered. The new beta skin is meant to be cleaner but side by side with other Mac OS X applications there are too many lines, buttons, trees, expanders, tabs and UI widgets. It looks and works like a blend of Windows and Mac OS X which is not a good thing. The UI needs to be cleaner and simpler. Focus on the music, forget all the clever little bits and bobs that add “just one more button.”
Added to the cluttered UI is a laggy UI. Click a playlist and it takes those few milliseconds longer than you think it should. This is the fine art of UI latency and the generic nature of Songbird’s architecture is putting a lead weight on that speed-of-click. Will the final release be faster? I hope so but it isn’t just about raw speed. UI speed is also about using transitions and magic tricks that make the application feel fast. The iPhone UI is measurably slow but it feels fast. Clever transitions.
Another complaint is the implementation of the browser mashup idea. Some items in the tree change the main viewing area while others unexpectedly launch a new tab in Songbird. The left-hand navigation disappears and you might as well be using Firefox at that point. By using tabs the websites feel disconnected from your music list. I want to see a music website on the right and my music on the left. A simple drag from right to left to download music would work then.
This is the direction Songbird is going though and it is at the maker’s discretion. I assume it works for them. Songbird won’t be replacing iTunes on my desktop and I’ll have to wait for another day to find the right blend of web and desktop music playing.
The last website I’d think of reviewing would be a newsletter system but Toddle is just too good an example of good website design to pass on by. It is also part of the Tuesday Push series.
Registration is simple; enter your email address. It takes you straight into the system. No passwords, no confirmation emails or age, gender, favourite movie and colour boxes to tick. Toddle does not really need a password, it works by sending the entered email the newsletter which you then forward on. So anyone “hacking” in would only send an email to themselves or to one other person.
Once in you can start creating your newsletter straight away. There is no save button or listings of previous newsletters to choose from (though you can have that if you want). From beginning to end you are working on one newsletter and it is all done from one page. Each template has a few sections with an image, header and body text. Fabulously simple and eminently usable.
Toddle isn’t for power users; it doesn’t have an address book (you send the newsletter from your email client), the templates are set and there is no scheduled sender mechanism. Toddle doesn’t need any of these nor should it ever complicate itself with further features.
For someone like me Toddle does everything I could want in a newsletter system. Beyond being a newsletter system Toddle is an excellent lesson in good website design.
Good work lads.
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