Radioshift

I'll stick to my former five-star review BUT there's one feature of this program that really annoys me. Every time you tune to a new station you have to listen to a fifteen-second advertisement before the station starts. Given the price the developers charge for this app., do they really need this second revenue stream, one that abuses their customers?? You might want to check out Radium before buying this product. Their developers are good people and don't do this kind of underhanded stuff.

Just trying to offset the rating appearing in my previous review, where I intended to rate Radioshift very low and NOT 3 stars! Let's see if it works this time... Radioshift User Interface is just so bad, not worthy to be called a Mac App, it's clicking hell! (read another comment to explain the details, I am not going to go through that). I recently found another Radio app, SNOWTAPE, which is a pleasure to use in comparison to Radioshift, and full of functionality as well!

Radioshift User Interface is just so bad, not worthy to be called a Mac App, it's clicking hell! (read another comment to explain the details, I am not going to go through that). I recently found another Radio app, SNOWTAPE, which is a pleasure to use in comparison to Radioshift, and full of functionality as well!

I really wanted to like this application... Somewhere, it contains a lot of functionality, but the awful User Interface makes it extremely hard to access. The UI is a mess, absolutely awful! This app is in love with paging and clicking… lots of it! What's wrong with an iTunes-like User Interface? Apple, and others, have thought through many usability issues, so why that desire to imitate the mess of a badly designed web site instead? For instance, RadioShift has a great ability to find radios, but the results are useless because of the UI: Let's say I search for "Jazz"… I get 629 results. This sounds great, right? But wait! The results are shown in pages of 10! So I need to painfully browse 63 pages!!!! Click, Click, Click, Click…. . This is INSANE! What wrong with scrollable lists, spreadsheets with rows and columns that I could scroll quickly with the mouse wheel/trackpad/magic mouse??? …with meaningful columns that I could sort by, with a filter to tune-in within the search results, etc, etc…? And to view the details of one particular station, I have to click on it, and I get to another page to read it, and then page back to the list (and the animations are making it even slower) and then carry-on clicking and clicking and clicking and clicking… What's wrong with an Info panel that details whatever is selected in the list. No! This application can't show the list together with the details of the selected station. Now… you can elect favorites… Great! you may think… But wait! You cannot simply right-click on a station and add it to Favorites, you have to page to the details, select Favorites, and go back to the list in search of another station. And there is only ONE list of favorites! What's wrong with multiple collections like iTunes' playlists? And the favorites are also painfully shown as pages again. My initial stations searching lead with 74 favorites (the search was so painful that I put many in favorites for checking later, to avoid repeating the search). Well… that meant that I had to pages through 8 pages of favorites! And I cannot reorganize them. Let's say I want to compare a station in page 1 and page 6 to see which I prefer? Click, Click, Click, Click… Again, please look at iTunes and learn how to do a functional and simple UI! Besides, it would be familiar to everybody… Very usable UI concepts have already been discovered for the kind of issues Radioshift has to deal with, the flagship being iTunes. Why go the opposite direction, and go for the look of a fancy, glitzy and mostly useless web site? What a pity to have Radioshift and all its great underlying functionality put to waste by an insane User Interface!