RefreshingApps.com

Bookmash is an Adobe AIR application mashup for video, music, photos and social news. It takes a different approach to many of the mashups you see and the more you get into this application the more detail you find. One of Bookmash main points is that it is translated into 13 languages. I’m sure that is the most I have come across in an AIR application to date.

The concept is to search across all of the five media types (or any subset) which then gets results back and displays them on a virtual wall for you to browse. Rolling over one of the wall tiles display a tooltip for that item, selecting it then zooms you into the wall tile displaying the detailed view.

You have the ability to bookmark any of the items you find. Being built in AIR naturally saves your bookmarks locally. Not only is this a link to the data but gives you the opportunity to view that bookmark offline if you need to. You can optionally share a bookmark with the many social sharing sites like Digg, Delicious, Reddit and Technorati.

Content comes from a number of sources with more planned in future releases. Video comes from Youtube,
Dailymotion and Metacafe while audio is provided by APIs from LastFM and Seeqpod. Images come from Flickr with Picasa support coming online soon. Together with social news from Digg and the ability to search for users on the major social networking sites.

Download is a big part of Bookmash, by default it creates a download directory inside your users directory on your host system. It’s here that download data is stored. Once downloaded video and music can be played while offline, which is what I’m doing now while on the train! I’m not sure of the legal implications of downloading music, but as the FAQ’s state neither Bookmash or Seeqpod are responsible for what you download through this app.

There is a lot of hidden features in this app which vary depending upon the media you are viewing. Some of the UX and design is quite poor in the detail screen, but that is something that can be worked on. It a good app for showing the possibilities of mashups on the AIR platform. The only problem I had with this app was that it didn’t want to quit on my Mac. I seem to have this with certain apps and it could be a bit of an AIR runtime bug, more research needed by me on that one.

Design eye

I like the 3d wall display as the main entry point into the AIR app. At first I wasn’t too sure how you moved it so I would recommend a visual indicator or a change in the cursor to reflect this. A nice touch could be keyboard integration using the arrow keys to slide the wall.

The menu I also found really tricky to use. It’s a self opening and closing accordion, which are not the easiest of UI elements to use anyway. It was very hit and miss at selecting the option you wanted. Hiding it out of the main visual area is good and adds to the initial visual impact.

Everything else is displayed in a modal window over the top of the wall using grey very Flex like panels. The layouts vary alot and there are many times where the content just doesn’t fit which forces scrollbars. A nice Flex skin and more user focused consistent layout would make this so much more enjoyable to use.

Technical eye

Bookmash AIR application is built using Adobe Flex 3 to mash up the numerous API and data feeds from the sites mentioned above. Load data storage is handled by the AIR runtime for local saving of your downloads.