(* apologies to Shakespeare for the flagrant misquotation)

A common response that we've had, when making the case for UBX as an application platform, is for people to say "Okay, show me an example". This poses a problem for us because, being a small team, we're often so busy working on our software that we have insufficient time left over to build demo applications. The last six months have been different for me, however, as I've had the opportunity to concentrate solely on the development of Hubbub, a new application that is built on UBX and Ubiquity formsPlayer.

In its current form, Hubbub is a social networking client based around a couple of popular web services: FriendFeed and Twitter. Our aim was to provide an interface to their APIs that was radically different to the look and feel of a traditional desktop application. We wanted the UI to be intuitive, aesthetically pleasing and unhindered by the limitations of convention. To that end, we enlisted the services of Bartek, a brilliant Dublin-based designer that we've worked with on a number of projects over the last few years. He came up with some great designs and helped us to put some intellectual dynamite under the constraints that application developers typically operate within.

Looking forward, there is still a ton of stuff that we want to do with Hubbub, however it is now at the stage where we're keen to start getting feedback from real users. It is only available on Windows for now, as there is still some work outstanding on porting UBX to other operating systems. But if you're interested in finding out more, check out the screenshots, or sign up for the beta and download Hubbub for yourself. And, if you have any feedback, bug reports or feature requests, you should post them to the Hubbub mailing list.