Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Social Jogger 2 Is A Sleek 4-in-1 Social Media Aggregator For Android

Sequel to the much applauded Social Jogger for Android, a social media aggregator for Facebook and Twitter ported over from the Acer Iconia, Social Jogger 2 comes packed with a new and improved user interface, Flickr and Plurk integration, deeper integration with Twitter and Facebook, an new home screen widgets. The app retrieves and displays posts, messages, photos and more from all four social media automatically after user-defined intervals and allows you to post status updates, upload photos and videos to all four simultaneously. The app’s extensive customizability provides easier browsing through the collective social media timeline and its deep integration with mentioned social networks almost eliminates the need to visit their mobile websites or access each network separately from within its official mobile client. More after the break.

Trasition-3DApp-Menu

Posts, messages, links, notifications and photos are arranged in tabs/pages whose titles are displayed in a scrollable tab bar at the top of the interface. You can switch between pages simply by swiping left or right across the screen or the tab bar itself. The app allows you to add additional columns, each for updates from a social media contact of your choice, hide existing columns and arrange their order from within Menu > Settings > Page management. You can also hide all updates from any of the four social networks (Menu > Settings > Account management). From within the Settings menu, you can alter the interval between successive automatic updates (Auto refresh) or enable/disable notifications.

From within the app menu, you can view Facebook events (Social events) and personal messages (such as Direct Messages from Twitter or those in your Facbook Inbox (Social messages), complete with an unread count above each. You can view your collective social media contacts list (Friends) from within which, you can open each contact’s profile page. The Auto Play option in the app allows you to sit back and let posts in the current page scroll away automatically at a speed of your choice.

Page-managementAccount-ManagementPersonal-posts

As mentioned earlier and exhibited in the following screenshots, the app’s integration with the included social media, especially with Facebook and Twitter, is quite deep. Tapping a post displays options from the corresponding social network and, in addition, allows you to share it over the web or delete it if it is one of your own. You can post status updates to multiple networks and even to a Facebook page or a friend’s wall simultaneously, upload photos to Facebook, Flickr or Plurk (Twitter photo uploads are not yet available), videos to Flickr and search your collective social network contacts list from the home screen. The app allows you to choose the destination album for each image that you upload.

Tapping a contact’s profile picture displays a badge/context menu containing shortcuts to email, profile page, contact info and more.

CommentingStatus-updateUpload-to-Facebook

The interface strikes a great balance between looks and efficiency and barring the little lag that kicks in during the 3D transition effect that sometimes appears when swiping across the screen to switch between two adjacent pages, it seems quite smooth. The app features two impressive (in looks and functionality) home screen widgets, one for personal social media messages and the other for posts from the rest of the pages included/enabled within the app. The former even includes a tab for incoming SMS. Pages that you hide within the app will be hidden from the first Social Jogger widget as well.

Social-Jogger-2-WidgetSocial-Jogger-2-Messages-Widget

Social Jogger 2 is undoubtedly one of the best social aggregators out there and a must-have for the avid social media user. Heck, it’s a lot better than TweetDeck for Android in a few aspects (stability being one of them). However, its no official client killer. Not yet. As of this writing, the app displays thumbnails for images, providing a link to the corresponding website. Until users are able to preview images within the app, most of them might not consider ditching the official social media mobile clients. Also, as mentioned earlier, the app does not allow Twitter photo uploads as of yet.

Head on over to the app’s XDA-Developers forum thread to download its APK.

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