Oh hey, new post. This time I’ll “review” the Shazam app for S60v5 that just came out on Ovi Store. And by review, I mean complain about glaring UI design faults. Brace yourself for a bulleted list!
So say you’re in the car (as a passenger, naturally, don’t operate your phone while driving yo), and the song on the radio is pretty cool, you get out your phone to identify it…
- Splash screen! Yes, you’re greeted with a splash screen making you wait before you can actually record the song. Who uses splash screens anymore? Over the top of my head, just Adobe Creative Suite. (which is not, by any stretch, a good UI example)
- Select access point every time! While I’m used to complaining about not having a default network destination setting, this app surpasses that. It gives you a list of all your access points for you to select the one you want to use, on every launch. It isn’t even the neat FP2 dialog, it’s just a plain text list. (and the song keeps playing)
- Theme changes! For some reason, whoever made this application thought it would be cool if the theme changed inside the app. In the screenshots above, I’m running the default 5800 theme, yet the signal meter, softkeys, option menus etc are different. Besides not adding any function or eye candy to the app (lol, ugly theme), it gives way to some fun graphical glitches when switching to and from this app! (for a similar effect, go to the jamster (lol) folder on the Download! app (lol))
- Vibration! For some reason, when you get a result after “tagging” a song, be it successful or not, the phone vibrates for a second, with no option to turn it off. lolwut?
- Encoding! As seen on the screenshot above, it gets messed up with accented characters, Vigüela, in the example. Update: Restarting the app once fixes any accented characters in the my tags list. lol?
- “Are you sure you want to exit?” dialog! lol
It’s not like it isn’t an improvement from the UI of the last version, but there’s just too many usability flaws and additions that just don’t make sense.
And then there’s the price. Shazam is free on iPhone OS, Blackberry OS, Android, and all those versions are far better designed/looking than the S60 version. So when I saw the 5 bucks (I’d link the Ovi store page, but that site is a mess right now) price tag I thought: “golly gee, they must have added something to make that worth 5 bucks!”. But yeah. Gravity proved it’s possible to make awesome UIs on S60, price them well, and sell them. Step up the game, Shazam (lol expressions.)
But hey, at least the icon is nice amirite? (:P)
Update:
I installed a new theme today, and when I went to the settings app to switch to it, this is what I found:
Seriously?
At least this gives me hope that it’s deletable. brb gonna try it. It is, go to C:\Private\10207114\ and delete the right folder. I didn’t take note of the name of the right folder to delete, but if like me, you only have two themes, it’s a 50/50 chance of deleting the right one. lol
Shazam ID for S60v5
Oh hey, new post. This time I’ll “review” the Shazam app for S60v5 that just came out on Ovi Store. And by review, I mean complain about glaring UI design faults. Brace yourself for a bulleted list!
So say you’re in the car (as a passenger, naturally, don’t operate your phone while driving yo), and the song on the radio is pretty cool, you get out your phone to identify it…
It’s not like it isn’t an improvement from the UI of the last version, but there’s just too many usability flaws and additions that just don’t make sense.
And then there’s the price. Shazam is free on iPhone OS, Blackberry OS, Android, and all those versions are far better designed/looking than the S60 version. So when I saw the 5 bucks (I’d link the Ovi store page, but that site is a mess right now) price tag I thought: “golly gee, they must have added something to make that worth 5 bucks!”. But yeah. Gravity proved it’s possible to make awesome UIs on S60, price them well, and sell them. Step up the game, Shazam (lol expressions.)
But hey, at least the icon is nice amirite? (:P)
Update:
I installed a new theme today, and when I went to the settings app to switch to it, this is what I found:
Seriously?
At least this gives me hope that it’s deletable. brb gonna try it. It is, go to C:\Private\10207114\ and delete the right folder. I didn’t take note of the name of the right folder to delete, but if like me, you only have two themes, it’s a 50/50 chance of deleting the right one. lol