Appatic

Thirteen23 is a Startup focused on UI-UX geared .NET App development (most of the time) that works in WPF and Silverlight. I find their Apps to be quite interesting so i am reviewing my favorites.So don’t get surprised if you see some of its apps reviewed and quick viewed here.

The Webby Awards is a ceremony that honors the excellence in interactive design, creativity, usability and functionality on the Internet (That is how the put it). Every year they give the awards and as they give one based on a jurors vote, they also usually give a award based on the people choice. This give the ceremony the needed balance it needs so everyone is so-so happy with whatever gets awarded. This seems to work and the results is the highlighting of a bunch of individuals and these individuals content that other way a lot of people would miss and that happen to represent some of the good or very of what was happening in the web.

The Webby Awards Player is Silverlight 3 based app that counts with OOB (out of browser) mode enabled and this allows you install it to a desktop no matter if you are in Windows or Mac OS X. This player app carries all the awarded content from The Webby Awards 13 series or what it was considered some of the most relevant for 2008.

If you find that proposition interesting enough, then you only need to go to the Player App page and you will instantly see a rectangle sized SL3 element loading up. 

Once it loads up it will show a little button/badge asking you to “run” the app. You only need to click it or right-click it in order to initialize it.

After you do that, it will give you a installation dialog like this one:

You can choose to only send it to your Start Menu app lists or to add a Desktop Icon. If you add the desktop icon, it will appear instantly once you install just by clicking OK:

As you click OK, the app will also launch instantly. That is it, you have installed and your are running it. it is a 10-15 seconds install and launch process.

As the app jump at you, it will instantly load up in the Videos Section of the App. The entries are divided by award and by who choose the entry. That is the webby jurors or the people choice as voted in the website of the webby awards. You will not that you only have a dial in a horizontal old TV tuner way.  At first it will load up by itself, but you can just grab it and browser as you like, you hold it with your cursor and let go for it to start playing.

The other section are the photos from the event in the red carpet, during the show and after party. Now the navigations is a simple photo thumbnail horizontal line with the same dial and you just pass them around at your pace.

I found the app very well put together, the only things lacking were that it didn’t had any kind of integrated controls for volume or play/stop and that it lacked Full Screen support. unlike the TED Talks Player App.

That last part seems to have been intentional as the player can only size up and size down in a very small range. so i guess the idea was for it to be like embedded player.

Why would you want this?

It is actually good content and it is already collected up in a easy and quick way to view. Consider it a packaged content channel. And since it is Silverlight 3 based. it uninstalls even faster than the time it took to install by right clicking on it while its running and selecting “remove this application”. If you decide to leave it around, it will also be able to notify you or fully auto update depending if Thirteen23 decides to fully update or just pass and deactivate it once the awards for 2009 have gone through. Good, simple and attractive player app for when you want to check out some good content from 2008 in case you have missed or want to relive some of it.

The app can be used in Windows  (XP, Vista & 7) and in the Mac (Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard).

Linkage

The Webby Awards Player

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