Adobe has made it’s CS2 apps (from 2005) available for free for anyone who has an Adobe ID (which you can get easily). That’s good news because some apps are less useful than others and not really worth paying big bucks for a now-and-then use. Since the servers are currently down you can download the MAC illustrator and inDesign versions here:
I’ll be honest, etsy shook my world a little bit because it looked far better than any Android app I’ve seen so far. And if there’s one there might be more, right? So I went out and searched for best designed Android Apps and while the list is not long (yet) at least there’s more than one non-stock beautifully designed App for the green robot. So let’s start, shall we?
1. Spotify
Spotify takes the first place and leaves the competition far away (have you seen that terrible Android Last.fm app? Exactly!). Here we have Android style UI with a lot of attention to detail, great font alignments, spacings and an overall refined look & feel. Too bad that’s just one app and not the entire Google Play offering…
2. Etsy
We covered Etsy last week and we believe it still deserves a place among the best designed Android apps, so here it is.
3. FlipBoard is another example that has been transferred from iOS with high precision. It looks almost exactly the same and it’s a good thing because it didn’t use the standard iOS guidelines anyway, so it translates well for any touch platform.
4. TuneIn Radio
A simple and clean app can be free of annoying design flaws like fonts touching the edge of the screen with no padding. Whoa! That is actually something on Android!
Do you know any other beautiful Android Apps?
Etsy has released an Android app recently and I was pretty shocked, because it actually looks nice. Most of the Android apps I’ve seen are terribly ugly. That’s not really because of the UI difference from other platforms, but rather because developers for Android don’t really care about quality. They want to release many apps as fast as possible and cash the checks. Plus Google Play store is not as strict as iOS App Store when it comes to quality.
A lot of apps have fonts that are mis-aligned, weird spacings or lack of spacing, pixelated graphics or banding on gradients (that is a problem but can be fixed). So the main reason for Android apps looking relatively worse than iOS and Windows Apps is that the developers are lazy or they do the designs themselves without hiring an experienced designer.
That is a problem for the platform, even if people got used to apps looking ugly. By the way, I’m not saying that iOS has better UI than Android. Don’t really like gradients and gloss in iOS as well. That’s not the point. The point is that within those guidelines (or sometimes outside of them – completely unique apps like Flipboard) most iOS apps tend to look more refined than Android apps. You don’t see many apps on iOS that have their fonts glued to the left side of the screen without any padding. Or fonts that are not vertically/horizontally centred when they should be.
Good that Etsy (among some other apps that I’m hoping to find soon) is showing the world how Android apps should be done. Nearly everything here is perfect. Good fonts, good whitespace, right size icons and the right relativity of elements make it a very well designed and very refined Android experience. Hope to see more of that on the platform!
Do you know any good looking Android apps? Let us know!
You can download the app for free at: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.etsy.android
Here’s a quick video of how HungrySquid looks on the new iPad mini. Both are simply beautiful! We love how the game plays on the 7.9 inch screen though, it’s perfect for puzzle gameplay. Far better than either the iPhone or the big ipad.
For a long time now Apple has made those ugly music apps icons – the iTunes icon (mac) and iPod / Music (iOS). What was wrong with them? Well for starters they used dark “note” element on a bright gradient background. That of course is not the case with most other iOS apps (namely Phone and Messages). The first iPod icon was also white and it was a bit less “obtrusive” to my taste. The current “dark” icon simply doesn’t fit the rest of the “simple gradient background icons” out there like the App Store, iTunes Store, Phone and Messages.
A while ago the same thing happened to the Mac version of iTunes, but now, with iTunes 11 the white icon is back. Hopefully that will inspire Apple to have the white icon on the iPhone as well. Seriously guys, that thing was SOOO much better in iOS 3.1.3, than it is now…
Not saying that that glossy, gradient filled new white icon is great, but it is an improvement.
The GoodGamePack project for iOS indie developers has started. We are proudly supporting it from the very beginning and we hope all of those 7 games will receive recognition and downloads they deserve. What is GoodGamePack you ask ?
It’s 7 games from 7 different indie developers from around the world. Games that received very high ratings (4.0 and up) on the App Store and very good reviews on many online sites. But they didn’t get featured by Apple and didn’t reach critical mass. In many cases they didn’t pay for themselves either. Instead of giving up, the developers decided to take action and created a pack. If you want to help out share the info about www.GoodGamePack.com on your social circles and buy the games:
HungrySquid , Nihilumbra, Monstaaa!, Kometen, Webbies, ZONR and Brainsss
Good Game Pack (or GamePack) is a web app that we just started (with Hype4) to gather and cross-promote great but undiscovered iOS games. We have reached out to 10 developers to have their games added and we will continue looking. If your game fits the bill, let us know. It’s completely free! It’s all about cross-promotion of selected game developers because well … United we stand!
You can visit the GamePack on your iPhone at GoodGamePack.com!
The first day was pretty exciting with hundreds of ideas, startups and the infamous Android rubbish bin ;) now we are starting day 2 with hopes of seeing even more great stuff. Photos will be added to this post throughout the day. Stay tuned.
We’re at this years Appsworld in London with Twisted Logic, Enveloop and Hype4 at booth 63. Check out the awesome passbook backend demo by Twisted Logic and come say hi :)
photos below and more coming.
A few days ago Yves Behar had said, that Apple products don’t really fit the software, as if they were made by two completely different teams. The industrial design is clean, simple and futuristic, while the OS has skeumorphism with stitched leather and all that ‘fun’ stuff. He inspired me to see what would happen, if the software design matched the industrial design, with color-coded OS for each device. Apple has been under a lot of critique lately, due to keeping it safe and not introducing many visual innovations to their software. I’m not saying my design is better. I just wanted to see how it’d look like if the design matched the phone quite literally. So I created the Black and Grey + White and Silver versions of the OS for the iPhone 5.
You can see the whole project at: http://hype4.com/whatif
After Apple released iOS 6 this week there has been an incredible amount of anger towards the new Maps application. People were pointing out mistakes, lack of POI and inaccuracy, and also many of the “flyover” 3d view bugs like destroyed bridges and buildings.
This is probably the first big Apple fail since Antennagate that’s so widespread. All the blogs and all the websites are complaining. But they fail to notice two things:
1. Google Maps will land on iOS very soon for sure (it was announced on Google’s mapping event in june).
2. This is the first version of Apple maps and all the negative feedback will actually help make them better.
The point though is that Steve Jobs would probably look over the whole world in those maps personally and check for errors. There are also many bugs in the new App Store (for example on the new iPad iPhone screenshots are distorted vertically)
Apparently quality control at Apple has lowered significantly since his passing. Too bad.
A while ago a group of dedicated Macromedia Freehand users created a petition to bring back the beloved vector image editor from the dead (or Adobe’s closet if you wish). Of course there’s no way in hell Adobe will admit that illustrator is not good enough, so they didn’t really go well with the idea of bringing a streamlined, easier to use and more intuitive vector tool back to the world. But fret not. Apparently FreeHand’s fans are really a dedicated bunch, because they’re making a “clone” of FreeHand, with modern features that would probably be added anyway if the software was still alive. The project is in development and there’s not much info available yet, but you can give the guys 25EUR to keep them both motivated and moving forward.
We think it’s a very cool idea, because let’s face it – the interface for Ai is dreadful. And since the Pixelmator Team didn’t start a vector app (yet?) we have to stick to what we hope will be the next best thing.
Check them out at : www.stagestack.com
A day before the very probable iOS6 launch, Google has released it’s standalone, native YouTube app for the iPhone. No universal version yet, but the iPhone version is much closer to the Android installment, than the YouTube iOS app we know and/or love since 2007. The icon has also changed to reflect the google approach, so instead of a skeumorphically Apple’y tv, it now just shows the YouTube logo. It also doesn’t work with iOS older than 4.3, so iPhone 3G users are kinda stuck with the original YouTube app forever. Hopefully it’ll still work after tomorrow.
The new design is actually better and easier to use, so maybe it’s not all bad that YouTube is missing from the stock iOS. Plus that’ll enable Google to do more frequent updates and keep the app on par with the Android version.
Watch the world’s videos and keep up with your favorite YouTube channels with the official YouTube app for iOS. Sign in to access your subscriptions, playlists, uploads and more.
You can get the new app
on the App Store
If you’re like me with millions of things “to do” and no time to do them, you’re probably using a task manager. Sure Apple has the “Reminders” app, but it doesn’t really work for stuff more complex than shopping lists. Two years ago a company called 6Wunderkinder introduced Wunderlist to the world. It’s a free task manager that had incredible growth during that time. Seriously, they have 3 million active users today. That IS something.
Then they decided to up the game and released Wunderkit – a collaboration platform based loosely on Wunderlist. The problem with it though is the fact that it’s 100% online and MUCH more complicated. Apparently users were wowed at first, but then rejected the app altogether and went back to Wunderlist. Which is exactly what I did (sorry guys).
Apparently they realized that they already had a hit product and it’s better to stick to improving on it, than to create the next big think, as it’s always tricky. In a recent blog post they explain why they’re coming back to WL and share their thoughts on Wunderkit’s failure.
What’s best about it is the fact that it’s gonna be native now, instead of being based on Titanium. That means that the 100% CPU usage bug on Macs will no longer be the issue. Also they’re planning frequent updates and new features! Awesome!
HTML5 is showing it's middle finger to Flash
It’s been a steady decline for Adobe Flash technology over the last few years. But in some scenarios it still stood pretty strong – one of them being games. Flash games exploded on the internet with many great titles (canabalt for example) and many not-so-great ones. When HTML5 took over web video as a better and more efficient player, games were still mostly a flash domain. Apparently that’s changing too, with Microsoft making HTML5 version of some Atari Classics and this WebGL wipeout clone that works extremely well in-browser on a 2011 11″ MacBook Air.
You’ll need a WebGL enabled browser (Google Chrome or Recent Firefox). Go to http://hexgl.bkcore.com to check it out!
In a few years Flash will probably cease to exist altogether if people can pull off things like that in HTML5 and WebGL. Good riddance!
That might give the mobile Win8 a boost!
Windows Phone 7 (and ultimately 8) was a little late to the mobile OS party. Sure it brought some fresh new clothes, but other OS’es were already the buzz of the evening and it was hard to keep up. The system offered very little features (aside from great digitally minimal looks) and it’s app store equivalent was seriously lacking. Microsoft was either paying devs to add quality apps, or re-designing some classics themselves, but it wasn’t enough. What do people want the most from a mobile phone? According to both recent and not-so-recent studies (meaning: it’s been a widely accepted fact) it’s GAMES. Preferably cheap, console quality titles like Shadowgun (pictured above) from MadFingerGames.
Well now there’s a chance of more quality 3d titles coming to the platform, because it was just announed that both desktop and mobile installments of Win8 will have full Unity support. That means it’s gonna be MUCH easier for developers to port their 3d games to the platform, thus increasing it’s value.
That’s one more step towards more market share of Windows Phone (Which is still extremely low). GOod luck!