The new NY Times Reader was released recently. It’s the second version of the Reader and, to be quite blunt, it’s head and shoulders better than the first version. The latest issue of INSPIRE, the Adobe XD team’s web magazine, is focused on the Times Reader project. If you are interested in gaining a behind the scenes view into the design and development of the Reader, I suggest you check out the following articles:
Ahead of the Times: Building a Next-Gen News Reader in Air
A video interview featuring Jeremy Clark (XD Design Manager) and Daniel Wabyick (Sr. Experience Developer) that delves deep into the collaboration between Adobe’s XD team and the NYTimes design team.
Designing for Print, Onscreen
Andy Day channels Justin Van Slembrouck, the primary XD Designer on the Times Reader project.
Recently out, a new AIR applications that showcases the Time 100. It was developed by the illustrious Eric Natzke using Flex Builder and AS3. Very cool to see the range of Natzke’s work (or play). While he continues to amaze with his actionscript generated art, he also continues to crank out more pragmatic but nonetheless beautiful and engaging experiences like the Time 100 app.
Note that you do not need a HP Touchsmart to use the Time 100 application (in other words, the app isn’t multi-touch). But the app features a spinning globe and a unique presentation of information that probably feels a lot cooler if you had one.
In my post before last, I wrote about what I consider to be Google Chrome’s potential future. This post details my take on Google Chrome’s experience model, when compared to Adobe AIR. I find this comparison interesting because Chrome + Gears begins to present a feature set similar to Adobe AIR.
My take boils down to two points.
First, Chrome’s multi-processing architecture presents the same benefit as wrapping and an existing HTML app with Adobe AIR. Namely, by taking the app out of the single-process browser, user workflows aren’t interrupted when the browser crashes or when the user quits it. The AIR Pandora app is one of the best examples of this benefit. I leave Pandora AIR open all day, but I quit my browser nearly 10 times a day for a variety of reasons. Back in the day when Pandora lived only in my browser, I needed to navigate to the site repeatedly every time I restarted my browser, which cost me, per day, around two minutes of lost productivity, about 30 extra clicks, and left me feeling frustrated.
Bottom line is that a multi-process architecture for a browser window is a good idea. Hopefully other browses adopt this model and help save end-users much time and tedium.
Second point: Google Chrome wraps your brand. To phrase that more precisely, because it is a browser wrapper, Google Chrome presents the same branding issues as any other browser. When in Google Chrome, your experience will be, to a certain degree, trumped by Google’s. Unlike with Adobe AIR, with Google Chrome your running application doesn’t have its own custom window chrome, or even OS chrome (which is brand neutral). Instead, your application is wrapped in, well, Google’s chrome.
I’m just starting to play around with Chrome, so as I learn about and experience it more, expect further observations on its user experience.
I fully appreciate that a good half of the article focuses on the user experience aspects of developing for AIR. The rest of the article is useful code. All in all, the perfect mix.
Now this is downright magnificent. The Sun, out of the UK, and with the highest circulation of any English-language newspaper in the world, has created one of the most technically advanced, and unique desktop experiences with Adobe AIR.
In a nutshell, the Desktop Keeley AIR application has two parts. The first is a small window that reads in the latest news, sports, and showbiz gossip. The second part is, well, what seems to be a transparent full screen window upon which a video of model, Keeley Hazell, cruises around, as if she were an avatar.
Update:
Here are the video-reviews of the Desktop Keeley AIR app. I’ve broken the review into three easy pieces. In each piece I highlight what I like, and what could be improved.
Announced yesterday, SwitchBoard aims to make it easier for developers to create AIR apps that hook into the Creative Suite:
Each SwitchBoard solution consists of an AIR application written for SwitchBoard, JavaScripts, and the SwitchBoard service that delivers the scripts to the Creative Suite applications. AIR developers only need to include a Flex library called SwitchBoard.swc in their projects in order to send and receive scripts to and from Creative Suite applications.
Excellent. Download SwitchBoard from Adobe Labs today, and start hacking.
I love Pandora, and I love Adobe AIR, and I’m trying to love the combination of both together. Download and give the Pandora AIR app a try, I’d love to hear what you think.
My main crit of the AIR app is actually a crit on the Pandora website, and brand in general. Pandora is very useful and usable, in my observation, but not well branded. It would be no small matter to completely rebrand Pandora, but IMO it needs it. As part of their experience branding exercise, I would suggest that they make their site more modular and easier to parse, standardize on a more professional style guide, and have a professional graphic designer work on their logotype.
It’s an RSS ticker that pulls random items from your feeds and scrolls them across your desktop. When you see a title that looks interesting, you can click on it to pop up the item in a window.
It’s also an innovative use of AIR’s windowing API. NJ decided to use a less-convential design pattern to present RSS items via a ticker strip that can be positioned on the edges of monitors, across different screens, instead of in a traditional window.
Perhaps what I like best about Snackr is that NJ designed it and built it. As some of you may know, NJ is a core contributor to the Flex product line, including Thermo. Bottom line is that it’s awesome to have the people who design/build the products and tools that are used to design/build RIAs and AIR apps, design/build their own stuff (did you get that?). By building his own stuff using Adobe products, NJ brings a true and deep sense of experience to all the Flex teams.
From the genius mind of Peter Eist, Belgian Flash programmer extraordinaire.
If you want to distribute AIR applications the install badge is definitely the best way to go. The one problem I had with it is that its a pain to prepare and embed on your blog.
To help remedy this I started working on this AIR Badge plugin last night, it allows you to simply use an [airbadge] tag and a couple of arguments in your blog post which will then be replaced by the AIR install badge.
Ethan Eismann is an Experience Design Manager at Adobe Systems. This blog is about Flash, Flex, AIR, Flash Catalyst, RIAs, design management, and design writ large.
