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http://www.sennep.com/work/bus-o-clock
I’m pretty ambivalent about including an app as there are lots and lots of places for app review and discovery doing a fine job already. However, I bore all iPhone toting friends about this app, which does something that many others do (live bus departures in London) but in a much more beautiful and delightful way, and think it is just excellent.
Concept 6/10
Design 17/20
Functionality 12/20
Total 35/50
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The blurb explains it best: “Nature Valley Trail View offers 300-plus miles of immersive national parks content, through panoramic views and interactive guides to three of America’s most iconic national parks. A blend of boots-on-the-ground fieldwork and future-forward digital technology”. The site “offers views of trails at Grand Canyon, Great Smoky Mountains and Yellowstone National Parks.”
Concept 7/10
Design 14/20
Content 14/20
Total 35/50
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The motto of ‘If this then that’ is ‘put the internet to work for you.’ Gloriously simple, and very effective: there is a list of applications (email, Facebook, Twitter, Evernote) and you use the statement in the name of the website to create links between the two. So for example, you might have every photo you post to your Instagram account automatically saved in Dropbox. You can browse a range of ‘recipes’ created by other users. A sample: ‘Email me every time Facebook adds a new feature’ or ‘Notify me of birthdays in my Google Calendar’ or ‘Send a digest of my top RSS feeds to Pocket every week’ (Pocket is a popular offline reading app). The range of very useful things you can do with this very simple mechanic is staggering and exciting. The site has been designed with visual simplicity and ease of use in mind, but it also pleasing to look at. This could rapidly become an indispensable tool, and is part of an internet that is growing more ‘useful’ for people in their every day lives, rather than simply being about creating or consuming content (two things it has rather spectacularly excelled at).
Concept 8/10
Design 14/20
Features 17/20
Total 39/50
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This application is a really really solid idea to help you plan fun things to do. It aggregates data from all sorts of entertainment, food/drink and event sites in London, and then serves it up to you based on criteria you’ve put in for what you want to do (location, date and the number of people). They have come up with a scoring system based on proximity to your target location, reviews of the places, and the amount of time you have available. If they can get enough data feeding into it and their technology can mimic what people actually want to do it could become a fantastic service as it will avoid users having to visit a whole bunch of different sites. It’s a big if however, as it’s always tricky for computers to match the whimsy of the average punter. The site is only for London at the moment but no doubt will roll out if they’re successful. One to watch.
Concept 8/10
Design 15/20
Functionality 12/20
Total 35/50
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Great idea, and great execution (with particularly strong design). The internet is so vast and sprawling that it certainly needs curation. However, that throws up all sorts of tricky issues around copyright, ownership and so on. This site proposes a ‘curator’s code’ to ensure that attribution happens as it should. This is their attempt at self-definition: “A suggested system for honoring the creative and intellectual labor of information discovery by making attribution consistent and codified, celebrating authors and creators, and also respecting those who discover and amplify their work.” Thanks to @annadph.
Concept 8/10
Design14/20
Content 13/20
Total 35/50
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I think this is a great idea. You rent cars from people who are not using them. They earn cash, and you pay less than you would to Hertz or any of those guys. Good idea, well executed.
Concept 8/10
Design 13/20
Functionality 15/20
Total 35/50
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Artist Jonas Lund has had a really cool idea. He says “I created an extension that sends every website I’m currently viewing to imhereandthere.com. It refreshes as soon as I visit a new website. It works a bit like a mirror to my browser and life - – you can now see what I see.”
Concept 8/10
Content 14/20
Design 10/20
Total 32/50
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Gosh this is so good! It’s just a lovely application - it’s a drum machine that looks old school stylish and allows you to make some absolutely awesome loops if you have talent (I do not). Even if you don’t, it’s really fun to mess around with. Warning: It’s optimised for Google Chrome and doesn’t work on other browsers.
Concept 7/10
Design 16/20
Functionality 15/20
Total 38/50
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This is a very nice application that lets you colour in a 3D skull image and then share your creation. It would be cool to have some more stock effects for the less artistically accomplished amongst us, but it works well (in beta) and is good fun.
Concept 6/10
Design 13/20
Functionality 14/20
Total 33/50
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OK, so this is an ad, and you will do it once and it will have given you all the pleasure that it can. However, it’s a nice piece of design, and it’s quite fun to do once so why the hell not?
Concept 7/10
Functionality 10/20
Design 15/20
Total 32/50
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A fascinating and unusual site that has books and stories at its core. The site takes people, places and objects from books and links them, gives detail on their background, and connects them with other mentions in other books. It’s a great way to explore information and how it is connected, and its an interesting take to dissect books according to people and things, rather than emotions and ideas. If you’ve ever wanted to find all the references to Snickers in books then this is the site for you (seriously, click here to find that out). Thank you to @chrisjvernon for the tip.
Concept 7/10
Functionality 15/20
Design 14/20
Total 36/50
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Byliner is a digital publishing company that publishes long form articles sold on Kindle Store, iBooks, and other digital publishing marketplaces. This is their website, which presents curated collections of writing from great fiction and non-fiction writers. It’s got lovely design, and the stories are great too. Click here to read a favourite of mine, about movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.
Concept 7/10
Design 15/20
Content 14/20
Total 36/50
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This is a fascinating experiment that has been running since 2005. Since August of that year, We Feel Fine “has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.).” These are then represented as dots on a screen, constantly moving and changing. Users can click on one of the dots and see the associated message. Fascinating and quite beautiful.
Concept 8/10
Functionality 15/20
Design 14/20
Total 37/50
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This site is an an excellent application that allows you to see all the articles that individual journalists have written and data about the topics they cover, the publications they write for, and so on. It has lots of potential applications for PR or business, but is also a really interesting way to track and read journalists that you like.
Concept 7/10
Design 13/20
Functionality 15/20
Total 35/50
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I love websites that take something that was previously tricky and awkward and make it clean and simple. Duedil has the potential to be such a service. It allows users to find out all sorts of information about UK companies. It pulls in information from numerous sources such as Companies House and puts them in a clean attractive interface. If you’ve used the abomination that is the Companies House site, you will know that this in itself is a valuable service. The site has many potential applications, from competitor research to evaluating a company that you’re considering working for, and I think it will go places.
Concept 7/10
Design 14/20
Functionality 15/20
Total 35/50
