Pownce released last night the first alpha of their new desktop client. The previous, at least for me, had become unusable due to login problem and such, so I’m quite happy that there is finally an official – yet still alpha – replacement.
This new version thankfully comes with a simplified style and also embeds content like YouTube movies and the like instead of requiring users to once again go to the actual website. The client still uses Adobe AIR and is therefor available on Windows, MacOSX and Linux.
Remember when Ariel more or less suggested to use PownceMonkey instead of the official app (if you had some problems with it)? Back then I thought it was quite an interesting move. With the release of this first preview of the next iteration of the official app, the team behind the app has also become bigger. This new version seems not only to be the next official app, but also the next version of the back then suggested PownceMonkey as explained by Jon Rohan, author of PownceMonkey and now co-developer of the official app.
So far the app works quite well, although it has some weird rendering issue for instance with YouTube videos, where the video is scaled down when it’s getting close to the border of the window.
YouTube videos get deformed
Also when you go to the “People” menu, you don’t get all your contacts, but just the “first” 10 and no pagination.
So basically you get what you should expect when downloading an alpha. The core functionally is mostly there, but that’s about it. That said, the app looks very promising and I guess you can expect a much more Pownce-like feel from it than from the previous version; especially since you get content-preview now at last. Previously the lack of the content preview that at least for me made Pownce so interesting more or less rendered the app pointless apart from it’s notification aspect since you still had to either download the attached content (or follow the link if it wasn’t an attached file) or jump to the website of the note.
From a developer standpoint I’m also thrilled to see, that the app is open-source and available on Google Code (bah,not on Github or Gitorious :-P )
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