Okay Geek Farm
An early look at AlienBlue for Mac, a Reddit app
Tyler Maroudas
The popular Reddit client for the iOS devices, Alien Blue, is finally (and un-expectedly) coming to the Mac! Here you’ll find a full fledge native desktop client, which seems very familiar to it’s iOS counterparts, that will be avaiable for download from the Mac app store soon. If you haven’t tried Alien Blue (and we highly reccomend you do), its the unofficial app for the popular news, culture and social site, Reddit.com . The app did very well on the iOS App Store due to tight design, being able to create shortcuts to your own personal subreddits to cut down on the amount of time and pages you have to spend on the site to navigate — and even though it sounds great, how will the Mac app stand up to the iOS apps?
Reeder for Mac at a glance
The Alien Blue client for the Mac looks like it has taken quite a few notes from its cousins accomplishment in the iOS App Store (as well as the new Reeder app for Mac), and is shaping up to be a promising move for Reddit on the desktop. With a minimalistic, but highly effective design, the app’s overall appearance seem to be also very fitting with the upcoming OSX release, OSX 10.7 Lion.
Large buttons with rounded corners, inlaid icons, and a display windows very much like the new mail client that is being packaged with Lion, with three panels, getting bigger from left to right. The left panel is used to switch between your subreddits, the front page, and different sections with your account (Options, Mail, etc). The mid panel will be used to scroll posts, or check on your messages and notifications. The largest panel, the one on the right, will be use to see the post you have clicked on in the middle column.
Some of the more interesting features list by the creator is being able to make folders to organize your subreddits, HTML5 integration for videos from Youtube and Vimeo, multiple tabs to open multiple posts at once, and a readability engine the formats web content before you view it.
AlienBlue for Mac in a nutshell
When it all boils down, the new AlienBlue app for Mac seems to be a success already, and we just can’t wait to get our grimy hands all over it. The AlienBlue team has never steered us wrong on our iPhones and iPads, and it looks like it’s smooth sailing from here on in — but the underlying question is will this app be more of a novelty than a day-to-day usefull tool, and will Reddit’s core audience be able to adopt such a drastically new design and form-factor?
