How to Make the World Tour in 80 Minutes

Does the music get the best of you? Welcome to the club! You and me and probably 90% of the rest of the world could serenely claim that, they not only work better but they also feel better when a glimpse of music touches their life.

Music heals, makes you tremble when you fall in love and helps you discover that type of energy and stamina that you never thought you are capable of.

Besides its healing and energetic effect, music can also boost your imagination and guide you in every virtual tour that you want to make with your mind’s eyes through the world.

The Looks

The background of the application displays a colorful alternative of the world physical map. It dynamically changes when you click on a certain area by automatically increasing the zoom and displaying the radio stations that are up and running in the neighborhood.

In the foreground, there is a rectangular black panel that displays a five tabs menu. The first tab allows you to visualize the flags map. The second tab gives you the possibility to visualize the radio stations by country.

The third tab groups the radio stations by Genre. If you know exactly what type of music you want to listen, you can browse from general to particular and choose a radio station that predominantly plays a certain type of music. Namely, your favorite.

In case you want to listen to a song again and again, the forth tab is for you. It allows you to see a list with the last songs that you heard lately and gives you the possibility to replay one or more of them.

Finally, the fifth tab, (the one that, in my opinion is also the coolest tab of all) encourages you to rate the songs that provoke you any type of emotion or feeling. More exactly, it lets you build your own scorings, tops and hierarchies.

In the third part of the panel, at the bottom of the page you can also visually track some info about the radio station that is currently playing, like: the station name, Genre, Reliability and Bitrate.

On the top of the page, you can also see the frequency and some classical elements for a radio player like: a Stop and a Play button plus a status progress bar.

The Works

Antenna is not an intricate application. Its highly visual and intuitive interface guides you almost wordlessly through the steps you have to follow to get the most of this Adobe AIR radio player.

The user-friendliness is so deep that, when you first open it, you somehow have the feeling that it belongs to those applications where you can drag-and-drop elements from one window to another and than simply click on the dragged elements to make them play.

At a closer look, you realize instead that there is nothing to be dragged into the application, but that it is fairly simple to localize a radio station.

To do so, you can either choose a country by its flag and than browse the stations lists for that particular country or choose a Genre and try to find which country has the most representative stations for that particular type of music.

If you are a more visual person, you can try to put your finger on a radio station directly on the map that lies in the background, as you would pinpoint an important element on a blackboard.

Furthermore, it's up to you if you want to browse the found radio stations by name, region, genre or any other criteria.

Once you have found a radio station that you love listening to, you can share this info with your friends, as the application offers you the chance to join a thematic chat. Who knows? By doing so, you might simply discover people that share the same passion as you do and thus, put the basis of some enriching and educational relationships. The Good

Antenna is a funky, user-friendly piece of software. It makes you feel that with just a couple of clicks you can travel to the Cocos Islands, Tanzania, Kazakhstan, Argentina, Philippines, Morocco, Australia, New Zealand, or even to less exotic but still chic destinations like France, Germany and Switzerland. From this point of view, of the wide palette of countries that it covers, Antenna could be definitely seen as a quite versatile, complete and stable application.

The Bad

At a glance, Antenna works pretty well, but sometimes it freezes from some annoying reasons like low Internet connection, an overstuffed requests queue or because some stations are temporarily unavailable. Even in those circumstances, Antenna doesn't get so clumsy and unresponsive as other similar applications do, but sometimes it gets to a point where it simply refuses to do anything at all, unless you restart it. The good thing is that it doesn’t block all the programs that run in parallel with it and, in consequence, the probability to see yourself put in a situation that requires to close all the apps and to restart your Mac is very low.

The Truth

Antenna is a quite useful application. I personally use it and I find it is a great tool to switch from French to Spanish, German or English or to whatever foreign language you speak or want to learn. This is, of course, only a side effect. The main purpose of Antenna is to offer its users a basic but efficient toolkit for spending an enjoyable day at work, in front of their computers.

And don’t you think it’s magical to travel all around the world and to discover rhythms that you haven’t even known they existed, with just a click?

Here are some snapshots of the application in action: