by Alex Holt | May 10, 2013 | Mobile, UI/UX |
Things I absolutely adore about the Sparrow interface: Facebook integration and gravatar make email more beautiful. I like pretty interfaces, they make me happy. Attachment interface is genius. What would make me super happy would be some way to attach files out of Dropbox or Crashplan (or even iCloud, i guess) – that would mean I could more or less operate completely on my phone. The recent recipients feature in composing mails is pure genius. The double stacked hidden sidebar is impressive, they’ve stacked a lot of info into a small space. Ditto the Inbox-Unread-Starred-Priority switching interface. The “more actions” bar at the bottom of the message screen is great. I like how it draws from the path fan, but makes it more direct, closer to my thumbs and cleaner. Not everything is peachy though, despite being the best iOS mail experience I’ve had to date (I’ve tried Mail, Gmail.app, Gmail web, Sent) Sparrow still has room to improve – and I’m not just talking about push notifications (Read about why it’s not their fault here: http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/push.php) Things I’d like to see Rich text support in signatures Despite Apple’s Mail.app (and other mobile Mail clients) opting to default your signature to a message telling people that you’re on your phone.. I very much prefer to NOT tell people. I want all my mail to look like it came from one device (let’s call it device agnostic mailing). Thus, I would like to be able to either a) copy my rich text signature or b) sync my signatures from Sparrow for Mac to my phone. Custom Signatures for aliases This could be me but I host mail for about 8 domains off my...
by Alex Holt | May 28, 2012 | Mobile, UI/UX |
So, a few weeks ago I came across Snapguide. It’s a great howto and guide app for iOS. The thing that really struck me about this app is how well thought out the interface is. iOS is a great platform for building apps to consume content, however content creation is somewhat limited. The only apps that really do a good job of content creation are simple, one step creation apps (like: Instragram, Facebook etc). Where you only create one piece of content, and you provide minimal information. Snapguide, on the other hand, has an inbuilt editor that allows you to create detailed photographic guides, all from the “comfort” of your iphone. The app basically asks its user to take photos of each step of a process and annotate them. It then joins these steps together to make a beautiful guide. The true interface magic is in the creation process. It actually makes it simple enough to take each photo, annotate it and add it to your guide. Also allowing you to re-order the photos and edit the guide (before AND after publishing). In testing the app, I created this guide (which went to their homepage features for a few days – and got a fair few likes as well): Make Paleo Tabouli. On a side note: i would highly recommend trying this recipe if you like tabouli.....
