Get The Best Seats For Dribbble With Courtside For iPad
Courtside (Free) by Bracket7, LLC is a beautiful Dribbble app for your iPad.
I will admit it now - I love looking at beautifully designed things. Icons, interfaces, artwork - if it's beautiful, I will like it. I'm not a designer or artist myself, but I enjoy looking at the stuff from people with talent. And where do you go nowadays to view beautifully designed stuff from talented people? Dribbble, of course.
Courtside is a beautiful and well-designed app to browse through Dribbble, and the best part is that it's completely free.
Once the app is opened, you'll get a brief glimpse of a gorgeous splash screen, which will already show the user that the developers took a lot of time and put a lot of effort into Courtside.
You'll then get a split pane "Featured" view (bottom tab menu bar), where the top half is a Cover-Flow of various work, and the bottom pane is filled with the avatars of the featured users. You can switch between Most Popular, Recent Shots, and Recent Debuts.
The "Shots" vew will give you large thumbnails of work in Popular, Everyone, and Debuts. Courtside will display plenty of thumbnails, but if you're still drooling for more beautiful design, the app will automatically load more shots for you to look at. So it is an endless scrolling wall of dribbble shots. Pretty nice, right?
From either Featured or Shots view, tapping on a shot will take you to a Shot Detail page. You can view the title, player name, when it was uploaded, number of views/likes/rebounds, and all user comments. A shot can also be saved in your "Buckets" or shared by Facebook, Twitter, Email, Tumblr, Evernote, copied, or saved to the Photo Album (all of these can be found under "More"). You can view the profiles of players as well, and see all of their work so far.
If there are any links, or if you want to view the actual Dribbble page of a shot, Courtside provides an in-app browser that works well, though you can't do much more than navigate between links (you can't enter a URL or anything like that).
In the Players tab, you can view your own shots (if you have the type of account to let you do so), view your following, and likes. There is also an option to view players with recent activity if you want to explore.
Buckets are like "folders." You can create however many you'd like to organize stuff you like into. It's a nice way to collect inspiration (but remember to give credit!) for your own future work, if you're good enough to be a Player on Dribbble.
You can view Tags as well if you have any. The Info tab also shows you what version number Courtside is currently at, and has a Settings button. There aren't many "settings" really, but this is where you would enter your Dribbble account name and clear your cache if you want. There are some options for sharing the app, contacting the developer, and learning more about Courtside.
The only thing that bothers me about the app is that I can't seem to "like" shots, even though I'm in my account. Though the app never asks for your password so I would guess that it's limited access, but I hope that the developers can change that in the future (fully featured with complete login).
Still, if you like to explore Dribbble and drool over amazing work from all the talented designers and artists out there, then definitely download Courtside. The best part is that there's nothing to lose - it's completely free.
