RefreshingApps.com

Snippage is a really nice AIR implementation of the ‘web snippets’ concept. Just like you can take a clip of a website with Safari on the Mac and display it on your dashboard, Snippage brings you the same functionality cross browser with Adobe AIR.

The AIR app has two modes – a browser view and a snip view. The idea is that you switch to the browser view, load up the website you want to take a ‘snip’ from then click and drag the snip box around highlighting the area you want to snip.

The snip highlight box has three hot corners available to you, for resizing moving and sniping. Once you happy with your highlight you press the snip icon and the browser view scales down to just show you highlighted area. Mousing over the window pops up a small header bar with four icons. Rolling over an icon shows it’s function underneath.

You can snap out into full browser mode at any point to adjust or remove your snip and create a brand new snip. I would like to have seen a remove button directly on this bar as I was not sure how to remove a snip that I had already created. You do get the option to remove when in full browser view.

Design eye

Snippage is an attractive AIR application. Nice simple iconography with subtle gradients and drop shadows (like in the browser address bar) give this AIR app a quality feel throughout.

Even though the icons are simply designed mousing over them offers up a helpful tip underneath the top bar to aide the user with a few words on it’s purpose. It’s a really good idea to offer up a little more suggestion as they use your application.

The transitions between views are smooth and are well timed in their execution. As mentioned previously I would like the functionality to close a snip without first transferring to full browser mode. An extra step could be added in prompting the user to confirm the close.

The website offers a video on how Snippage works. However on initial startup Snippage could offer to guide the user though creating their first snip. This could be via video or short animation. Just another way that you can offer a little more to your first time users.

In all a very nice example of a simple AIR application.

Technical eye

Built using Flash CS3 with ActionScript 3 and the power of the AIR runtime to enable multiple web browser instances.