Update:Designspiration App Review

February 3, 2011 5 Comments

Being a designer, I saw this App and bought it right away. It's an app that is advertised as inspiring design. It connects you to all the popular design blogs and its laid out in a way that is specific to showing off art. This app is absolutely beautiful – from the UI, how the RSS feeds are shown, even the tile looks sexy. I mean just looking at this app inspires creation. The problem is that this app (as of right now) is like a really dumb beautiful girl.

The issue is two-fold… The loading and the speed at which swipes and button presses respond. Once you open the app it takes about 1/2 a minute to load fully. Trying to maneuver around before that might freeze the app. So finally when you are done waiting and your app has loaded it is still rocky to navigate. There is no smooth transitions, even scrolling through the blogs can become a chore. This is really disappointing because the app is really a brilliant idea and it looks amazing. I really hope they can correct these issues soon before it's too late and it gets tons of bad reviews on the marketplace.

If you are a designer and frequently visit blogs like Cool Hunting, Core 77, Design Mind, Design Observer FFFFound, Inside/Out and Smashing Magazine. I advise you guys to keep an eye on this app. When its fixed it'll be a great mobile tool.

[rating:2.5]

Update: After releasing version 1.1 this app has seen alot of improvements. It still has some smoothing out to do but it is very usable at this point. We are changing our review score to…

[rating:3.25]

Thanks – macult