Beautiful Pixels

The Platter — 7 April 2013

Beautiful Pixels / April 7, 2013

We are extremely happy with the feedback we have received so far for The Platter. We are trying to make each one a little more eclectic. In this week’s platter, we have two interesting static site generation tools, two very creatively presented stories and your usual service of apps. Thanks for being awesome and without furthur adieu here’s the platter this week.

Google+ iOS

Google+ has had an amazing iOS app from the start. Over time, it has outclassed almost every other social network app. We featured it in our Best of 2012: UI Animations post as well. In its latest update, Google+ added some great things. There are now photo filters and effects available while uploading and the implementation is pretty neat. The earlier reliance on the left sliding menu is gone and an edge swipe to the right brings the lovely new profile page with cover photo out and a swipe to the left reveals the notifications. Posts can now be closed by pulling up or down, which is a nice touch. Overall, Google has done a bang up job with the Google+ iOS app. It is available for free on the App Store.

Action Launcher Pro

Chris Lacy has made quite a name for himself in the Android community with his well thought out designs in his apps. Tweet Lanes for Twitter was one of the best looking Twitter apps on Android, but it hit the token limit a while back. Action Launcher Pro is his launcher which most recently got updated to fully support tablets. It also introduced a feature that we love so much that we had to feature it here. Shutters is Chris Lacy’s take on Android widgets. While widgets are definitely great for quick access to information, they often end up looking like garbage on a homescreen. Shutters allows you to view an app widget quickly by swiping the app icon up or down. The implementation is brilliant. He has a nice video demonstrating shutters on Android. Action Launcher Pro is available on Google Play for $3.99.

Valet for Android Remembers Where You Parked

Rohan Naravane / April 5, 2013

This may have happened to you at some point of time in your life — you just cannot remember where you parked your car. Blame it on the ever-increasing vehicular population or simply our overloaded brain capacity that diminishes the ability to remember simple things, it is a common issue. Valet for Android is an elegantly designed app that helps you solve this problem.

Available on Google Play for just a dollar, the app opens with a relevant background image of a street with cars parked to the side, covered with a subtle dark tint. Next, the Valet logo beautifully fades in at the top. ‘Simple’ is a keyword that was probably coined just for apps like this one; all you see is a squarish frame showing Google Map data, and text below that says ‘Park My Car’. So let’s say you’ve parked your car on a street or in an outdoor parking lot, just hit that button and it puts a big black marker pin on the car’s location. Remember, this app is only useful when you park outdoors, as GPS unfortunately doesn’t work indoors. Oh how we wish something could be done to remember parking spots indoors as well! There has been more than a few times when I’ve ‘misplaced’ the car at those vast basement parking spaces.

Anyway, hitting the “Park My Car” button reveals a couple of other handy tools. A mechanical alarm clock icon lets you set a timer or an alarm; this can be helpful if the place you’ve parked only allows you to do so for a specific time. The use of white coloured font on that tinted background looks delicious. Also, certain elements will feel familiar to Android 4 users, like the horizontal slider to set the timer or like the triangular markings at the corner of text, that let the user know of drop-down menus in the Alarm. The ‘X’ button takes you back to the previous menu, which lets you manually “Unpark” your car. The last button is the all-too-familiar ‘Share’ button used in Android, allowing you to share your car’s location with other apps.

An “A” button next to the Park button uncovers, what we think is, the trump-card feature this app has to offer. Think about this for a second — this app won’t be of any assistance if you forget to use the app in the first place, right? The “Auto Park My Car” is a simple yet highly effective if you have a Bluetooth-enabled music system in your car (if you don’t, we highly recommend you consider it!). Now, once you select your car bluetooth audio device, it will automatically “Park Your Car” the moment it disconnects with your phone. Brilliant execution, we say! But just to point out something that didn’t go down my throat well — this feature is enabled via an in-app purchase ~~that costs ten times the money spent on buying the app itself. I hope it is brought down to a reasonable level~~.

Let’s say now it’s time to get back to your vehicle. Opening the app again reveals the black pin on the map, and your location is represented by the typical blue dot seen in Google Maps for Android. It also shows you the name of the road the car’s been parked on and how far you are below the map — a nice touch. If you’ve gone too far, the “My Location” button at the top-right corner orients the map to where you are. What if you need directions to get back to your car? Clicking the first button opens up Google Maps with the pointer set to your car’s location.

Valet for Android is a simple, elegant way to remember your parking spot — why just parking, any spot you’d want to remember. Car owners will definitely want to have this app aboard their Android phones. You can download it from Google Play for $0.99 here.

Update: The developers have now slashed the in-app purchase price to almost half the original cost.

HLP Flashlight — A Gorgeous Flashlight App with a Digital Compass

Preshit Deorukhkar / April 4, 2013

One of our awesome readers recently sent us a link to this flashlight app on the iOS App Store. Now, one might say that the App Store is already overflowing with simple, one-feature flashlight apps already. But if apps like this are making their way to the App Store, I’m not complaining.

Named HLP Flashlight, the app sports an absolute beauty of a UI. It has a lovely minimalistic look to it and managed to very quickly impress me when I first launched it. The textures, shadows and gradients are superbly implemented and HLP Flashlight shines in every aspect. But it’s not only its gorgeous UI that caught my eye. The app has a big rounded dial in the center of the app through which you control every feature offered by the app. Tapping the button in the center turns the flashlight on/off. The upper half of the dial is actually a digital compass. As you move your phone around, the dial shows you exactly where the top of the phone is pointing towards. The bottom half of the dial can be moved from the left to the right and sets the throbbing rate for the Flash — the more you move it to the right, the faster the flash blinks. The right-most setting is an SOS setting that flashes the SOS code via the LED. There’s a small indicator light on the left which indicates the status of the LED.

HLP Flashlight is a Universal app, so it works both on iPhone and iPad. Since the iPad lacks a flash at the back, the app just uses a blank white screen to simulate bright light. The app is a great little flashlight utility app and makes for an easy download, considering it’s Free on the App Store.

Here’s a quick video explaining the features of the app.

Ulysses III — The Incredibly Impressive Plain Text Writing App

Preshit Deorukhkar / April 3, 2013

Over the last 2 years, we’ve been witness to some insanely good apps debuting on the iOS App Store. We’ve showcased some of the best ones here on Beautiful Pixels and we continue to be blown away with the new UI trends, interactions & UI animations that designers and developers come up with in every new app. In general, I have seen that majority of iOS app releasing these days come crafted with some impeccable polish to them. That being said, a lot of you will also agree that the Mac hasn’t seen much action lately. Sure, there are a few developers who continue to churn out brilliant Mac apps or are known to be working on some (Hint: CHOCKERRIFIC), but in general, the Mac’s been pretty lonely. So I was pretty excited to check out what The Soulmen had been working on over the past several months. Spoiler Alert: I was very impressed.

The Soulmen today released Ulysses III, which in spite of what the name suggests, is a whole new app. Ulysses III (henceforth U3) is a single-library, single-window writing app designed for writers. If you write for a living, U3 comes packed with features to the brim. It is available via the Mac App Store at a special introductory price of $19.99 for a week, after which it’ll be sold at its regular price of $39.99. Read on to find out what makes U3 such a great Mac app.

Puk is a Minimal and Frustratingly Difficult Game

Mikhail Madnani / April 2, 2013

Puk by Laser Dog Games isn’t your everyday casual mobile game. Calling it a fast paced game is a massive understatement. It looks amazing and utilizes only 2 colours for the most part. Puk isn’t something you play for hours at a stretch. It will be there for that quick fix of gaming that will either leave you rewarded or extremely frustrated. The sounds in the game did remind me of Hundreds and what is it with game developers and minimal games involving circles these days?

At first glance, Puk is all about projecting small white hollow spheres onto solid ones above. The background for everything in the game, barring the boss levels, is orange. The audio and music is very minimal because believe me, you won’t even be paying attention to that. The game doesn’t have a tutorial in the beginning and you learn as you play. The screen is divided into two main sections. The smaller section at the bottom has your pucks or hollow spheres with small arrows inside them and the larger section has larger spheres with an x in them. Aiming the smaller pucks is like using a slingshot in Angry Birds and you have to hurry up because the divider doubles up as a timer that becomes a solid wall if you haven’t completed the level in a certain time. You earn medals if you complete levels quickly and Game Center achievements as well. If your pucks fail to hit the target and the divider timer has closed, you can shake your device up to three times to try and navigate the pucks to the targets. This felt very clunky compared to the rest of the game. After the game is over you can share your score on twitter.

Puk utilizes the touchscreen perfectly and does what casual games are supposed to do, making it a great game for a mobile devices. It has 1000 levels and is really difficult to play as you progress. Puk is available for only $0.99 and is more than worth it. It is available for Android devices on Google Play and for iPhone on the App Store. Be careful while playing it on a Android device with on screen controls because that back button AKA Android Shuffle (no one knows what it will do in most cases) will cause the game to end and make you lose your progress.

The Android App that Swept Us Off our Feet

Preshit Deorukhkar / April 1, 2013

We don’t get to talk about Android apps much too often here on this site. Coming across a well-designed Android app isn’t as easy as it is finding a gorgeous iOS app. But we recently stumbled across an Android app on Google Play that swept us off our feet. Honestly, it was hard to believe at first when we first saw it, but we’ve been playing with the app for the last couple of hours and we can guarantee that this is nothing short of marvelous.

The app is called ‘Resume “Rakesh Kumar Jha”‘ and is Freely available on Google Play. And in our opinion, it is one of the most beautiful collection of pixels that we’ve ever seen brought together in an app. The UI is absolutely breathtaking and almost makes you wonder why iOS designers haven’t managed to reach this level of perfection. There’s an impeccable amount of detail in every aspect of the app — including the app icon. Heavily inspired by the rounded Avatar concept, the icon is a 100% perfectly drawn circle and features Rakesh’s photo.

The app’s User Interface follows Google’s HOLO guidelines and works perfectly while navigating through the app. Swiping through the content feels like butter on glass, which is weird because I was eating butter-bread while playing with the app. You can navigate through different sections like Objectives, Qualification, Work Exp, Project Details, etc., which lay down all the necessary details. The text is very neatly laid out in each section and looks crisp & phenomenal, even without any padding from the edges. We love that the developer has managed to utilize every single pixel available to him, because who likes vertical scrolling anyway!?

The text in the app makes use of a terrific font, which was obviously required to go along with the beautiful UI. I have seen many Retina iPads & MacBooks out in the wild, but none of those came close to the crispness that this app was offering on the screen. It was clearly evident that RRKJ had undergone some remarkable polishing to perfection.

We love the concept of putting out dedicated app for resumes, so that you can just ask your potential employers to download essential information about you. Moreover, this also opens up the chances of them ditching their iOS device and purchasing an Android powered phone in order to view your resume. Overall, we were pretty impressed with the app. You can check it out on Google Play, it’s Free.

[Masthead from here & here. H/t @schmmuck.]