LifeBrowser
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App Review: NetFront Life Browser for Android
This is no photoshop -- it really is an Android browser that lets you tilt web pages, but there's more than meets the eye. The folks at Access have just launched this free NetFront Life Browser, which packs a few interesting features that caught our attention. Let's hold hands and walk through them together. Upon launching the app for the first time, we were taken to a "unified navigation" landing page that consists of two sections: the top half displays live thumbnails of opened windows, and swiping left or right gives you a smooth 3D transition between them; whereas the bottom half shows you stacks of pages à la Apple Time Machine for history, bookmarks, and scrapbooks. Speaking of which, the scrapbook feature is also one of the main -- and probably the funnest -- highlights here: this is where you can store virtual cut-outs using the scissors tool at the bottom right of the browser, thus creating pictorial bookmarks. If you want to mark something specific on a page, then you can use the checkmarking tool -- located right next to the scissors -- to do so, but bear in mind that the marks will disappear if you close the page's window (so it's fine as long as you keep it in the background). %Gallery-107445%
Life Browser adds sideswiping, improved page queue
Building a better browser for iOS devices is a bit of a Sisyphean task. When you're pitching your product against one of the most successful mobile browsers of all time -- in fact, when you and everyone else trying to hike the trail are simply staging your product atop the underlying WebKit engine shared with Mobile Safari -- it's not easy. The best approach may be to identify the pain points Apple isn't addressing in designing Safari for 80% of the users, and hit hard on the convenience and features demanded by the other 20% who might be shopping for a new deal. Looking at Life Browser, the latest project from the team at It's About Time, brings home the concept of power features for the rest of us. This snappy browser, available in a $2.99 universal build and an $0.99 iPhone-only version, is evolving pretty quickly as user feedback translates directly into new features and bug fixes. Life Browser first appeared on the iPad back in June of this year, at which time TUAW provided a first look at the app. The three big features that recently joined the list for Life Browser are sideswiping to navigate from open page to page, an 'Open Sites' popup at the bottom of the screen to assist navigation, and the seemingly-omnipresent 'pull to refresh' pioneered by Tweetie/Twitter on the iPhone. Life Browser also tweaks and improves the Queue feature, which is handy for preloading links off of a page you're browsing (think Reddit or Twitter, where you might want to see several outgoing links without jumping forward and back repeatedly). All in all, Life Browser provides quite a bit of value for your app dollar, and the rapid iteration of features and fixes is good to see. It's a shame that there isn't a way to do a trial version of the app, because it's hard to know if you're really in the 20% of high-needs users who will really take advantage of the power it brings.
