Metro Style UI on the iPad

I am very intrigued by the new Metro design introduced by Microsoft, and I was excited to experience it on the iPad.
Track 8 is a gorgeous Metro music app with nice graphics, a clean layout, and smooth animations between menus.

Track 8 displays songs by artists, albums and playlist, and it shows best if your songs all have album artwork.

Less impressive, but still interesting, is FlickStack: a photo browsing app for Flickr and 500px photos.
The style adopted by FlickStack is a mixture between iPad and Metro style. Below an image of the home screen.

When in portrait orientation the left navigation is collapsed and the picture tabloid takes the full screen

The images of a selected stream are displayed in a even grid, which I found visually less interesting.



The same view in landscape orientation displays the navigation to all streams, compacted in a panel on the left, and the images of the screen on the right. I found this layout a little too busy and unnecessarily complex.

If you are not on a budget, you can experience, for  $25, a more complete Metro experience on your iPad by using Win8 Metro Testbed – powered by Splashtop. Win8 Metro Testbed is a simple remote desktop application, and it requires a connection to a PC installed with Windows 8 Consumer Preview.

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Beautiful Visualizations on the iPad

ROAMBI is an iPad app that displays gorgeous visualizations with beautiful and fluid interactivity. Here some examples.
Pie chart.


Bar chart.


Squares.


ROAMBI has are many more visualizations but most of the magic actually comes from the interactivity. If you are passionate about visualizations and you have an iPad, I suggest you to play with this app. It is free and has some demo data you can use to explore the different visualizations. The two videos below show some of the features of this app.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

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Make it simple and beautiful

StambleUpon iPad app has updated its landing page, making it visually striking and extremely interesting. I am kind of impressed by the difference this makes for me, and how much more I enjoy using this app now.
I found the new layout to be simple, beautiful and inviting.

This is the analogous page in the browser. Again, the page is very simple, and tailored to my interests.


This is how the page used to look not long ago. The categories were displayed on a bar on the top. The page itself showed the recently rated pages with comments and stars. The side panel showed the people that had rated the page. All of these was irrelevant to the use of this app. This was in a sense a facebook-like page which did not make much sense for this type of app. I honestly have no interest on recent activities, neither on who is an active contributors. Let me wonder around and discover stuff I like, simply and unintrusively.

Which one do you prefer?
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

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Elegant layout and amazing browsing experience with Flipboard

Flipboard has one of the most elegant layout and browsing experience of any other app I tried.

I was amazed how information looks more interesting when laid out in a tabloid format rather that in a table. 

Most of the magic is in the interaction. The transition between pages simulates flipping the pages of a book.

I suggest watching this video to get a sense for yourself.

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