The Myspace Mobile App, and why it needs some polish

Hell, a lot of people know I use myspace. I use it to keep in touch with friends.

As such, I’ve been using the Myspace mobile application quite frequently. And I’m continuing to notice that it reeks of crap, directly opposite to the Facebook app.

I’ll look over a few cases here.

It takes forever to load, over EDGE. While you may blame this on the network itself, Facebook manages to be up and running in less than 8 seconds for me on EDGE. Myspace takes 15 seconds to load, even longer to load your profile picture and mood. Loading photos over myspace takes forever as well. This leads me into another point…

Suggestion: Care to optimize MSM for mobile access?

No Full-screen photo mode. Facebook has this. I can’t see a shot in detail because there is no full screen mode. There is a fullscreen button once you are viewing a photo, but the bottom button bar, the top button bar, and the status bar remain on screen. I can’t view a full photo? Meh.

Suggestion: Make it like Facebook. Fullscreen IS Fullscreen. I want NOTHING but the photo on screen if I invoke fullscreen.

Absolutely NO ACCELEROMETER SUPPORT. I don’t mind this in the vast majority of MS Mobile, but for photos, it’s almost a dealbreaker. Photos taken in landscape mode will always show up in portrait mode on MS Mobile, and for some photos it looks outright horrid. This is already bad enough with the faux “full screen” option.

Suggestion: Speaks for itself, really.

No easy way to delete messages. When I’ve already read a message on the computer, I want to swipe my finger across it, and punch the red Delete button that should appear. Or at least give me a way to DELETE THE MESSAGE WITHOUT READING IT. If you want to delete multiple messages (ha, fat chance), you have to open the message, tap delete, then tap OK on the message that appears, and open your next message. Very inefficient.

Suggestion: Give us swiping gestures, or at least a way to mark a message, then delete it, without reading it.

The Signout button is VERY badly placed. It’s a little skinny bar right between the status bar and the application’s title bar. You have to have small fingers to tap it right on your first try. I’d suggest moving it to the Home page in MSM.

No iPhone predictive text support. Yup, if you want to message or leave comments, you are on your own as far as typing goes. You mess up, you have to correct it. MSM doesn’t support the iPhone’s dictionary. What’d I like to know is: HOW did this slip past unnoticed?

As a last one: Stop using your own UI! Consistency is king. Make it look like an iPhone app, not like something else. That blue tinge irritates me all the time.

I hope someone at the MSM dev team reads this, and gets an idea of what needs to be done. It seems like MSM was just shoved onto the App Store and left to sit. I hope that’s not the case.