Sometimes, it’s even the simplest interfaces that are the hardest to build - when you have a huge amount of features and only a limited amount of space on the screen, it can be challenging to cut features out, or hide them elsewhere in the app (yet still have them be accessible). We’ve created a collection of 15 applications that have done an astonishing job of uncluttering the interface and leaving a beautiful, simple design that’s a joy to use.

Tweetbot

Tweetbot by app designers Tapbots is an iPhone app that makes tweeting easier, and has clever shortcuts for viewing entire conversations and for favouriting tweets.

Hipmunk

Hipmunk aims to take the agony out of booking a flight online by displaying flight search results in a much simpler, easier to understand way.

Square

Square allows you to take credit card payments on your iPhone or iPad, easily.

New York Times Skimmer

Skimmer by the New York Times is a different interface for browsing through news, predominantly designed for tablets. As it’s name suggests, it makes skimming through news stories easy and fun.

Batch

Batch is a new iPhone app which makes uploading and sharing photos through Facebook & Twitter a breeze.

TeuxDeux

TeuxDeux is a task management app that makes adding and crossing off tasks simple. It’s perfect for people that like their to-do applications minimal and unfussy, but still beautiful.

Greplin

While Google handles searching the web, Greplin aims to help you search through your life. The app connects to your email accounts, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more, and lets you search everything all in one go. Despite it’s complexity, the interface has been kept beautifully simple and elegant.

Oink

Oink is the newest iPhone app from Digg founder Kevin Rose.  Instead of rating places, Oink allows you to rate the things inside - everything from the best coffee in a café to the best films on at the cinema. The interface is uncluttered and sophisticated, and it’s beautiful design feels natural and intuitive to use.

Calvetica

Calvetica is an iPhone calendar app that aims to provide a minimalist way to organise your life. It’s clearly had a lot of attention, design-wise, but it’s also simple and easy to use, whether you’re drilling down to specific events or just quickly glancing at it - it’s simplicity gives you the information you need, and nothing else.

Flipboard

Flipboard is an iPad app that turns RSS feeds into easy-to-browse articles, like a digital magazine. The interface is both beautiful and intuitive, which makes the whole experience fun.

Stypi

Stypi is an online document editor, similar to Google Docs, which allows multiple people to all work on writing the same document at the same time. It’s a fairly complicated idea, but it’s been executed perfectly here - following the Apple philosophy, Stypi “just works”.

Basecamp

Basecamp is a project management tool which has both a web interface and an HTML 5 mobile optimized site. Both interfaces work perfectly for the medium they’re on - it’s always easy to navigate around and view calendars, timelines and tasks and clearly a lot of thought has been put into usability.

Twitter for iPad

Twitter’s official iPad app looks simple, but hides a wealth of features and shortcuts. Selecting a tweet and sliding down with two fingers, for example, reveals the whole conversation. It’s a brilliant example of a stunningly elegant user interface.

Reeder

Reeder for iPad makes RSS feeds easier to browse through and has clearly focused on making a simple, beautiful and usable app. Scanning through articles and blog posts is very intuitive and the design of the content is easy to read, with plenty of white space.

Things

Things for iPad is a task management app that allows you to tag tasks, add them to particular projects and archive old tasks in a logbook. Despite having quite a few features for power users and fans of “getting things done”, the interface keeps things simple - only showing you what you need and never cluttering up the screen with unnecessary distractions.

Are there any user interfaces that you think deserve a mention? Let us know in the comments.

About the author

Alex writes for printing experts Print Express, who specialise in postcards, business cards and flyer printing.

Other Beautiful User Interfaces?

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Facebook Admits to Playing Dirty

While it is currently sitting high atop the social networking ladder, Facebook has also found itself in the middle of controversy due to its questionable approach toward stamping out the competition. In early May, a suspicious email made its way into the inboxes of several prolific journalists and bloggers. The message, which was sent out by Burson-Marsteller, pretty much slammed Google’s name in the mud, alleging that the search giant had committed a major violation of user privacy.

With the internet community buzzing and scrambling to figure out the mastermind behind the mysterious email, it wasn’t too long before Facebook came out and admitted that it hired the public relations firms to do its bidding. According to the social networking company, Google utilized Social Circle, a feature native to its Gmail webmail client, to steal personal user information from Facebook and other sites for inclusion. Though many are surprised that the social network came out and admitted that it was involved in what is now infamously known as the “Google smear campaign“, it seems as if it had no other choice after the evidence reportedly dug up by news outlet The Daily Beast.

Things Could Get Even Uglier

The collision course Facebook and Google find themselves on has been in the making for some time now. Theses two powerful entities are competitors in numerous areas, including social, search, and online advertising among others. While the so called smear campaign obviously marks the most intense episode of the war up to this point, some have been predicting an all out showdown from the moment Facebook outpaced MySpace as the number social network. With Google looking to enhance its social profile, Facebook doing business with Microsoft, and both companies gearing up to invade the daily deal market, it is probably fair to conclude that this war could get even uglier in the very near future.

Welcome to Cut Throat Island

In the business world, competition is all about survival, and if you need another lesson on just how cut throat it can become, you got it with the recent developments in the war between Facebook and Google. For marketers, it is a perfect example of how some competitors are willing to pull out all the stops, even if it means playing dirty. Take it as a lesson on the importance of staying on your toes and being able to respond promptly to adversity. Google is strong enough to shake off Facebook’s blow and return the favor. How about your business?

About the Author:

Fletcher is a best practices activist and advocate for leading Web and permission-based email marketing services.

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Photo by Gauldo

JanRain RPX

JanRain RPX WordPress plugin allows connections to your web site by various means, including Facebook Connect, the Google, Yahoo, Twitter, MySpaceID accept as AOL, the Windows Live ID and OpenID. After installing the plugin, users can connect to a page and comment on your blog about these providers and suppliers have icons next to the commentators.

Facebook Status Updater

This plugin will automatically updates the status Facebook Fan Page, publishes Wall / Wall Group Home / twitter when you send a new message. We might have to wait a little, because it doesnt seem to work with Wordpress 2.9.2 yet.

Wordbook

Wordbook allows users to publish to WordPress blog updates of their Facebook profile Mini-Feed. You must connect your Wordpress blog with your Facebook account when to use this plugin.

Gigya Socialize

Gigya lets you authenticate users through Facebook Connect, MySpaceID, Twitter, Google, Yahoo and AOL. Apart from this, you can update your social networking sites to your blog and invite your friends to your blog by visiting this link. After activation, simply go gigya website and get your API key and Secret key to use this plugin.

Facebook Fan box

This plugin allows users to add a fan box to their blog. The fan-box will appear as a sidebar widget. To use this module, you can simply create a fan page on Facebook, you will receive a unique key identifying your profile API and you’re done!

Fotobook

Fotobook lets users can access Facebook account and import photos, then link these images you can use on their blog. In this section, users can import photos from multiple Facebook account and displays these images on the sidebar. It is an easy instrument to use Ajax manage photo albums. Note: This link does not work with Wordpress 2.8.

WP-FacebookConnect

WP-FacebookConnect adds features to Wordpress with the Facebook Connect API. It provides single sign-on to your Facebook account to post comments on news content, a profile of Facebook, and use images as avatars comment.

Feed Facebook

This plugin creates a separate power supply on Facebook. If you do not like, such as Facebook face your blog feeds, you can then use this plugin to forage for Facebook to summaries only.

Facebook Dashboard Widget

This plugin uses Wordpress widget to attract and display your Facebook friends status, show your post and notificaton at your Wordpress admin dashboard. With this method, you can find these updates without login to your Facebook account.

Add To Facebook

Add To Facebook is a simple plugin that will add a link at the bottom of the current location, so readers can easily share the article with a friend on Facebook.

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About the author

Yanuar Prisantoso is a 25 year old web developer in Onebitmedia, he has experience in the web design and web development industry and is very interested about jQuery and interactive on his blog, Denbagus. You can follow on Twitter or contact him through his website.

Write guest posts for KnowTeBook

If you’re a writer and know a lot about design, coding, …… or owning a small business, you can give great advices on branding, marketing, productivity, dealing with clients (and other related topics), or you can write ‘how-to’ posts, please get in contact with Sebastian.

There are numerous ways for brands to leverage Facebook but the overall branded experience is becoming increasingly integrated into a single offering as the new Pages product highlights. So what are the primary benefits and changes for the new branded pages?

• Build a community
• Login using your Facebook account
• Send comments to Facebook profile feed
• Invite your friends to the blog community
• See last visitors

There are a few more solutions out there for other blogs and website on the offical facebook connect wiki.

Also worth reading is Add Facebook Connect to Your Blog in 8 Minutes providing a great video tutorial.