Posted on Jan 28, 2009

Great Moments by Design - EventBox

EventBox HUD in action.

In the last couple of years there has been no shortage of applications and services that offer to aggregate your various social networking accounts, bookmarks, contacts and (occasionally) emails into one location. EventBox was recently introduced and operates along the same lines, but as a desktop app rather than a web service. I was intrigued when I first heard about it and took a look. But at the time it was not that useful to me so I nuked it and moved on.

But when they announced syncing with Google Reader, I was sold. And after two weeks of usage, there have been several items that strike me as examples of great design.

  • First, I can favorite items in my Twitter account. Other services I’ve used (e.g. SocialThing) do not work in this regard. This is a big plus for me.
  • I love the HUD that was recently added to this app. It’s similar to Twitterific, but shows all your services in the stream.
  • As well, the HUD can be used to display all your feeds, just one feed, or just one type of item in a feed. For example, you can set the HUD to only display Twitter updates or limit it to Twitter DM’s. I love this feature—I can use the HUD as I would use Twitterific (as in the picture above) and use the main EventBox window to scan my RSS feeds, like I would NNW.1
  • You can favorite items in Google Reader (unfortunately it does not seem that you are able to view a list of your favotited items).
  • Silent mode: You have the ability to easily turn off notifications for those periods when you need to be distraction free. Your ‘unread’ count increases, but the HUD or Growl notifications will be turned off.

EventBox is a great overall application, but these items were a step above. It gives me one location to perform all the actions I was previously doing in two or three different tools. And when I step away from my Mac and use my Touch or another PC, my interaction with the various web services are synced and it’s as if my usage was never interrupted.

All in all, it’s a great start for an app that is still in beta.

  1. And I have to say here, when I get time to work on the 23″ ACD, going back to the Macbook monitor is just … sub-par. Extra windows like the HUD here just take up too much space. [↩]