RefreshingApps.com

Do you remember the futuristic touch wall UI from the Minority Report? Well this AIR app with have you addicted for hours just playing with the interface.

UvLayer is a social video application where you can discover, watch, collect and share video media. Searching currently focuses on videos from YouTube and Truveo (which searches videos from across the web).

Drag and drop video thumbnails from the search results window to your canvas, put them on top of each other or lasso them. Now be the DJ and play them as a playlist!

What makes this video sharing site special, apart from the UI, is that by logging into your Facebook, Google Talk or AIM account you can drag and share videos with your friends.

When your search results appear they arrive as small tiles and fan out across the virtual desktop. Creating stacks is as easy as dragging one tile ontop of other existing tiles, this stack can then be named and stored. As you start using the app further you realise you can keep existing searches and the associated results as a grouped folder. Then just for fun throw it across the desktop and watch it slide!

Video playback is handled by internal player that appears when a video tile is clicked. You can start to play numerous videos at once. Mini thumbnails appear at the end of a video for related videos.

I can’t help but compare the interaction to that of the TileUI experiment by Doug McCune. TileUI uses the Papervision3D engine to give the app an even better 3d desktop feel. I would love to see a hybrid of these two in a future app.

If you are a heavy user of Facebook and like sharing lots of videos with your friends then this app is perfect for you. Alternatively just watch and throw tiles around, I guarantee you’ll have fun.

Design eye

I like the design, colours and interactions on this app. Purely because it is different to the other video AIR apps out there. What is interesting is that the user creates there own UI out of video assets, UvLayer just provides the tools to make that possible. This possibly shows the way in which future apps could develop, where the UI is enhanced by a users content.

Using tiles was a great idea and the hub of the whole application.

Technical eye

The primary application is built using Adobe Flex.