Walk by anyone’s desk at my office and you’ll see TweetDeck running or minimized in the background. It started as a great piece of software for the hardcore Twitterer and has matured into a pretty good social feed aggregator. I never really loved the UI though. It’s treatment of the chicklet buttons across the top always seemed to be an inelegant way to execute a button bar.
The other day I decided to incorporate social media feed monitoring into my daily routine (acquiescing is a more appropriate word) so naturally I popped open TweetDeck, but I started to feel the same “ho-hum” response I had when I first noticed the app. Yes they have a few new features, but the UI and experience of using the app has remained largely the same. It was then when I remembered Skimmer, the application built and distributed by Fallon and designed by Andy Gugel. I remember giving it a brief mention on this blog and promising to kick the tires a bit – which I’m now getting to.
Aside from the beautiful visual design of the application – with it’s strong use of a gridded structure and subtle tone-on-tone coloring – I really like how you can commingle the feed to incorporate all of your social accounts into one reverse-chron feed. You can also minimize the application into simply the feed as a widget (smaller footprint on your desktop). This feature is great. I know TweetDeck does that too, but I don’t like the way that TweetDeck’s minimized view is the same main application view – just resized to be smaller. It’s inelegant. Skimmer on the other hand actually repositions and re-imagines the UI for the smaller footprint.
So the bottom line is that I’m a Skimmer fan – great work Fallon and Andy. I prefer an application that (arguably) does less, is positioned as a great user experience rather than a hardcore workhorse, looks great and simplifies the process of interacting with its main objective over anything else.