If you’re a designer, you probably already know about and are on dribbble. Dribbble is a community for designers to showcase their latest work and get feedback from others. It is an amazing source of inspiration for anything related to design. There have been quite a few dribbble apps for iOS and they look great. Balllin’ was my pick for the best dribbble iOS client until today. Misecia of NowPlayer fame have just released Backboard, a beautiful dribbble app with nice gesture controls.
Backboard features a nice overlapping pane interface akin to Sparrow’s and Facebook’s iOS apps. It doesn’t go overboard with different gradients and elements and has a flat UI which seems very popular recently. When you launch the app, you are shown the popular shots of the day and swiping from left to right reveals the main menu. There is an option to enter your username and see who you are following. It also has a built in twitter view to see tweets by users on dribbble. The detail view for a certain image resembles the Facebook timeline where the image is the cover photo and the profile picture is the Player’s avatar. Images can be shared to twitter or viewed on the dribbble website from here. You can read the comments but not actually post any due to Dribbble’s API limitation. Tilting the device horizontally gives you a nice full screen view of the image and a swipe will give you sharing options and the Player’s name. The profile view lets you see your Shots, Likes and also the people you’re following, people following you and draftees. A two finger swipe from left to right will always take you to the main menu while a single finger swipe goes back or takes you to the menu. Tapping the avatar takes you to the Player’s profile. The settings page lets you change the accent colour for the app with a few options available and let’s you enable iCloud backup.
Misecia have been raising the bar with UI for a while now and I’m very pleased with Backboard. The only thing that may put other apps ahead of this is the fact that this is iPhone only and not universal. At just $0.99 on the App Store, Backboard provides you with a beautiful experience for browsing Dribbble and does better than other iPhone-only dribbble clients on the App Store.