RefreshingApps.com

The BBC have always been associated with technical innovation, and they have just released a beta of the first Flex AIR application to see the light of day from the guys down at Wood Lane.

The BBC LiveUpdate AIR application is not going to set the world alight but as an app to test the waters for AIR it’s a start. Basically it’s an reader for the BBC news and sport sites where you can customise what feeds you want in your display. However I could only get back to the preferences panel by right clicking on the app icon in my dock, could there be a link within the app?

There is a detail view when selecting a story that has a blur transition from the list view.

You can get the LiveUpdate app to start on bootup and set it to float above other OS windows.

I can see this being a useful tool to get the process of delivering an AIR app understood but I can’t see it replacing a good RSS reader like Snackr.

Design eye

You can tell the outline design was to suite the new BBC homepage, however there just seems to be lots of UI and design inconsistencies. The scroll bar on the main page looks unfinished and lacks any hover or down states but bizarrely is very different to the scroll bar on the ‘customise’ panel.

The customise panel again looks unfinished, yes it uses an accordion but the headers don’t look clickable enough and the hover state is strange. Why is the close button floating on the left?

Also I couldn’t help but click on the indicator that shows the connectivity status of the app, please don’t make it look like the other buttons. How about a toggle like indicator or just text saying either online or offline like TweekDeck?

Finally the preferences panel is fixed, despite my attempts to drag it. I’m not sure on the BBC’s branding guidelines but you could do a lot worse by emulating the BBC iPlayer UI to gain consistency.

Technical eye

Built using Flex and ActionScript 3 with various BBC feeds.