app design critique

smart apps for creative people presented by @mprove | metascript | mprove design

[app-design-critique]

Beethoven 9 by Amphio (app acquired from Touch Press) contains four different complete recordings of Beethoven’s 9th smyphony, the complete video with Bernstein, an interactive score, informative comments in sync with the music, busy musicians as pulsing dots, and lots of video interviews. You can even switch between the interpretations at any time to hear the different orchestras! This is marvelous and designed with so much passion and deep understanding. As a side note, the executive producer Max Whitby is also the director of Hyperland – a 1990 BBC documentary with Douglas Adams and Ted Nelson. Watch minute 18 to see the grand grand grandpa of Touch Press' app.

From Touch Press’ Blog:

Behind the scenes of Touch Press: Guy Jones on Beethoven’s 9th

Beethoven 9

[app-design-critique]

Pixaloop. Once in a while you find a gem. Pixaloop offers a clever way to add mesmerising animations to photos and paintings. The example above shows how Westminster in the Moonlight by John Atkinson Grimshaw (1880) can be turned into a moody loop with the flowing river Thames and drifting clouds. The animation is defined by the combination of vector strokes and fix points that do not move at all.

Some more examples and experiments by myself on twitter: Strong Winds | Venus and Aeneas | red mural girl | Borsig Berlin | Helgoland  

The basic version is free. A subscription offers even more features like rotating spiral areas. But the fee is  is quite high.

Pixaloop Home | Pixaloop App 

[app-design-critique]

Artivive. Well, what’s going on here? This is a screenshot of Artivive, while augmenting the reality as displayed on my computer screen – showing a photo of a painting by Paul Delvaux at Albertina in Vienna. Of course, the original intent is to use your mobile phone or tablet while exploring the museum. Surprising - fun - interactive – if the piece of art has been prepared to be animated with Artivive.

Artivive Home | Artivive App

[app-design-critique]

How to create a very special and unique login screen:

1) Launch a space station /phew, this is done. 2) Tune into the live video feed – for instance at ISS Webcam 3) Get the upper video into full screen and landscape mode. 4) Gaze in awe until you fall in love with the current view. 5) Take a screenshot and use it as your lock screen wallpaper. 

6) As a kicker, you can follow TheRealBuzz and wait until he shows up on your screen in space. Epic!

[app-design-critique]

Beautiful Mind is a minimalistic and elegant web app for the game of Mastermind. It’s my weekend exercise to design and develop the app with just JavaScript and HTML5 – and plenty of interaction design considerations. (ok, color-accessibility is on the wish list.>> check Beautiful Coins ) enjoy!

Beautiful Mind | Beautiful Coins

[app-design-critique]

http://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth – mind the arrow key navigation through time. Even better if the millions of years would be blended smoothly together. /via fastco

[mprove]

http://stars.chromeexperiments.com/  /via

[app-design-critique]

100.000 stars, a google chrome experiment to display and navigate our home galaxy. Star descriptions are pulled from Wikipedia. A wonderful interactive visualization of our home in the context of the milky way. Maybe I am missing something here, but the only draw-back is the fixed center of the Sun. I really would like to travel every which way through our galaxy. 

[app-design-critique]

Orphion. I could not believe what’s going on here. Still on my first generation iPad it already feels like a fifth gen touch device with pressure detection. Touch softly to produce soft sounds – hit hard for loud and tinny sounds. Stunning. Bastus Trump did a splendid job developing this new digital instrument.

In 2014, Bastus was demanded by Apple to remove the app from the app store b/c Apple did not like the way Orphion uses the shape of the touch to play strong and soft sounds. What a silly decission! But your can still enable and enjoy the effect by double-tapping the version number in the about box.

Here is a little tutorial how to customize and connect Orphion with ThumbJam to play a Hang on iPad.

Orphion | orphion.de | Orphion meets Moog | Bastus at Soundcloud | video tutorials

[app-design-critique]

Sometimes something is too fast to watch in detail on youtube. And youtube’s user interface is not suited to properly replay certain sections of a video; in this case: Don’t be so hot by Me and My Drummer to catch the chords. Snippz offers exactly that. Slow motion and jump marks for precise navigation.

[Update June 6, 2017] Snippz has just been updated to v2. More space for the video (image 1), which can even be zoomed. Less space for the timeline, which makes it a bit more difficult to edit the hot areas compared to v1 in the second image.

Snippz

[app-design-critique]

Waterlogue offers water color filters for photos. The results are impressive. However, for my taste, the app is a bit slow and the interaction is limited. I would prefer more influence on the pictures while they are painted by the algorithm.

Waterlogue

[app-design-critique]

Apollo MIDI over Bluetooth connects 2 devices with each other, either iOS or macOS. Hence my MIDI USB keyboard can now be connected with out any wires between Mac and iPad. The USB is plugged into the Mac, and Apollo transmits the MIDI over Bluetooth. Nice. Yet another successful link was just between AC Sabre on iPhone to ThumbJam on an iPad.

Apollo MIDI over Bluetooth for iOS | Apollo MIDI over Bluetooth for Mac 

[app-design-critique]

AC Sabre. Gestures to midi. After a few moments I’ve connected this music light sabre to ThumbJam on the same iPhone. More experiments and fun ahead. Get AC Sabre for 60% off until Jan-31.

AC Sabre | Air Craft

[app-design-critique]

Alfred significantly speeds-up the operation of the Mac. Press Cmd-Option-Control-Space to open a textbox hover and enter… text! This is a mini and powerful CLI (command line interface) to launch apps, find folders and open documents. Alfred can do much more than that, but just alone launching applications by thought and muscle memory leaves more time for being productive and creative.

Alfred | AlfredApp.com 

[app-design-critique]

As Noted. The simple and powerful personal note taking environment for iPhone, iPad, Android and Chrome on the desktop. Notes are synched via dropbox among all your devices. Tags, notebooks, search, im& export w/ Evernote. Simple and robust.

– Disclaimer: I am the designer and co-developer of As Noted.

As Noted

[app-design-critique]

iThoughtsX and iThoughts by toketaWare are two mind-mapping apps that synch between Mac and iPad/iPhone. In addition to sharing maps, customized styles can also be shared among devices. Tip-over diagrams – the example above is a UX Journey Map – have different layout rules depending on the node level. Typically they make good use of the real screen estate. Last not least, as in Mindcad Incubator, sheets can contain more than just one graph.

iThoughtsX at half the price on π-day only

iThoughtsX | iThoughts

[app-design-critique]

Mindcad Incubator. Did anybody say that only mobile apps are presented on app design critique? Incubator is my favourite mind mapping tool for Mac. It does not come with the usual constraint of just one root node for the mind map. This clever detail is a huge advantage during brainstorming when ideas are not yet structured in any hierarchy. Incubator has a simple and clean user interface. The keyboard shortcuts are aligned with the Finder – hence powerful and easy to remember. The limited amount of features is one of the huge advantages compared to other mind-mapping tools. However, if you need a more powerful layout engine I can recommend iThoughtsX. I use both apps for similar purposes.

Incubator

[app-design-critique]

The best to say about ThumbJam is that it made me curious to explore the world of music on the iPad – and that it stayed among my top apps ever since. The number and quality of sampled instruments included  is impressive. More instruments can be downloaded for free. The variety of scales is a cultural journey around the globe. 

It should be mentioned that ThumbJam does a superbe job to take the gyroscope and accelerometer as input to twist and bend the sounds, e.g. shake the iPhone to play a wild e-guitar vibrato.

I’ve configured the screen above to play Hang 1. More layers are added for Hang 1.1 and Hang 1.2. MIDI support allows other apps to interact with ThumbJam.

Update: I even found an easter egg – on Easter!!

ThumbJam