I want the drugs these guys were on
So we have the first of what will probably be many desktop clients for FriendFeed now that they have released their API for developers to muck about in. While Alert Thingy is still in development Sobees has released their desktop client called bTittleTattle and to but it simply it reminds me of some of my acid flashbacks of doing California Sunshine while sitting on the hill overlooking the river.
The client is written using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and the .NET 3.5 Framework and it lives up to the greatest fear that I had as a developer before hanging up my dev tools. Before I quit any dev work I was getting heavily into working with WPF and felt a great enthusiasm for what I believed that WPF could bring to the table for creating excellent interactive user interfaces. At the same time I was also greatly worried that developers would cross over that line of usability and be replaced with gaudy over animated interfaces that made the application behave and look more like a cheap little toy.
bTittleTattle crosses that line and in the process breaks just about every usability rule there is. Sure it looks cute and if that is what you want then hey go for it but cutesy only lasts up until trying to use the program is a battle between being productive and looking cool (click for larger view).
The idea that you have to have fly-out dialog screen in order to even write a comment or even mark something as ‘Liked’ makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Sure the ability to adjust the font size and message area on the fly is a nice touch but it isn’t something that needs to be on the front of the user interface.
If this was an exercise is showing off some of the cool things that developers can do with WPF and .NET then sure I would say they partially achieved their goal but in the long run as a full time usable FriendFeed client - well let me put it this way - it’s already in the recycle bin.
Conversation Tags: FriendFeed, Sobees, desktop client, Windows Presentation Foundation, .NET