Skimmer: The Most Well Designed AIR Application Yet?

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skimmer_logoWhile at SXSW last week I got to chat with some of the folks from Fallon, a really great agency known for being on the leading edge of design and technology. They showed me an AIR application that proves that. The application is called Skimmer and is part Twitter client and part social manager. You can update your status for Twitter or Facebook but it also includes a media viewer which allows you to view your contact’s photos and videos from sites like Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube.

skimmer_shot

The key is that they spent a ton of time thinking about user experience and design to create the application and they said they wanted to capture a great out of browser experience for social media. To that end they’ve got very cool full screen functionality, drag and drop uploading to Flickr and YouTube as well as the option to view everything offline. It’s a perfect use-case for Adobe AIR – a bridge between the cloud and the desktop. One of my other favorite features is the widget creator. Once you sign into your accounts you can customize and generate a Flash-based widget that will show off your Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter posts. It’s something I plan to use on my root domain as a fun way to show what I’ve been doing.

On the technical side they also have a good implementation for the OAuth-type of functionality for Flickr and Facebook. This is something AIR developers are going to have to think about and I liked the way they implemented it with an extra window spawned by the application and loading the Facebook or Flickr authorization in an HTML control.

Congrats to the team at Fallon. I love this application.

Related posts:

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  2. AS3 Library for Facebook
  3. Facebook Fatigue
  4. Easy Photo Uploading with AIR and ImageDropR
  5. How to Completely Uninstall an AIR Application
  • http://www.kelvinluck.com/ Kelvin Luck

    The app looks nice and I’d like to check it out. However, if I understand what you are saying about how they implemented OAuth then I think this is a big no no. If they are displaying the login page in a HTML Control which is part of their AIR app then they are just asking people to get phished. How does the user know that they actually are at the website they think they are? How do they know the AIR app isn’t capturing the key presses.

    I’m not suggesting that Fallon are doing anything wrong but the whole point of OAuth is that the user inputs their username and password in something totally independant of the app asking for authentication. Putting the login form within the app defeats this purpose and is just as bad as the password anti-pattern that OAuth is meant to prevent!

  • ryanstewart

    I’m actually really torn on this. I think the HTMLControl provides a better end user experience because the developer can control it. In a pure web context, you’re right, everything goes through the web browser.

    But we’re on a desktop application which means the user has already given a lot of trust to the application. If you’re worried about getting phished, then you shouldn’t install the app.

    I think this is a great discussion and I’m always tracking the OAuth groups to see what the consensus on desktop applications is.

  • http://www.simplifiedchaos.com todd

    The application is pretty cool. It’s a good step in the right direction for consolidating a control center for social applications.

    I’d love to see an open source effort using AIR, with a plug-in architecture that builds ONE application that will allow you control/publish/read all your social media services. One application I can upload to any site that takes photos, one app where I can publish status everywhere (or by self rules/tags), etc…

    There’s been many good attempts, but I have yet to find one that works for all the disparate services I use. I think the key is an easy plug-in interface so that different devs can build the plug-ins and publish them based ont he services they use.

  • http://denisvolokh.blogspot.com/ Denis Volokh

    seems to me impressive…but I don’t like that there is no feedback on user interaction. For example, login form or registration. I entered all necessary data and clicked nice button. I expected something, something to inform me that everything is ok and I need just wait for a seconds, but nothing is happened. Unfortunately, I could not create account.

  • Bobby

    I think that opening the user’s browser window to authenticate would be a better idea.

    Considering the context of that user knows Flickr/web service as a browser based application.

    By opening the user’s browswer window to Authenticate the application to access his/her’s Flickr, there is a clear seperation what is the AIR app and the Flickr service.

    You also get the browser’s chrome and security measures. (SSL lock, URL, Anti-phishing)

  • http://idletogether.com/ Nicolas Noben

    I personally think that it is shocking UX. It’s a webpage looking desktop application, and designed like print. It makes good use of white space, but the way the data is presented is meh.

    Sure it looks good, but it doesn’t feel right, and certainly not like a desktop application.

    That’s my view only :)

    Other than that, the features are great. It’s the presentation layer I have a problem with.

  • http://www.flex888.com Sravan

    In this particular case, Skimmer is a digitally signed app. Can’t that mean that such paranoia about authentication may be unnecessary?