Vive la Revolution

I wasn't going to buy an iPad, it was a just big iPhone, it seemed like an evolution of the iPod touch, nothing too exciting there... Then I held one.

The iPad disappears, you no longer interact with a computer you interact with an app. The iPad becomes the app in a way that no mouse based system could and that the iPhone never quite managed, it is the most immersive user experience that exists today.

I have read a lot of comments about the iPad that call it a crippled netbook, the problem with this is that I owned a netbook and it felt like a crippled laptop, it failed because it tried to be a laptop, the iPad doesn't try to be a laptop, it exists as a bridge between the smartphone and the desktop, a revolutionary product designed to fill a niche we didn't know existed.

Vive la revolution

NetNewsWire

I used to use NetNewsWire on the Mac and the iPhone and FeedDemon on the PC, then they moved to use google to sync feeds and I moved to using Googles web interface on the Mac and PC and Reeder on the iPhone.

Next I got the iPad and after looking in the still sparsely populated app store, my old friend NetNewsWire popped up again.
I like this app a lot, the interface is really clean, in landscape you have the feeds/articles listed in the left third and content fills the right. In portrait the content fills the whole screen and the feed/article list are accessed via a popover. I primarily use landscape mode, it is the perfect setup to browse content, I can skim the list of articles, pick one and while it loads continue to skim headlines. I find Portrait mode is useful only for exceptionally long articles where it feels more natural to read like that.

Portrait mode also has a UI element that I dislike, in landscape to mark all as read you click a button at the top of the screen and then hit a mark all as read button in the same place, in portrait you click the same button at the top but then the mark all as read button appears right at the bottom of the screen, forcing you to move your hand farther than necessary. This minor change feels like it was designed prior to actual use, which it most likely was, I hope it is corrected in a future release because other than that this app works like a charm for reading.

Another area where this app excels is in the ability to integrate with instapaper, two clicks and the article is saved. This is a huge bonus which wasn't available on the iPhone app when I last used it and is especially useful on a WiFi only iPad. Other options in the app are to mail the article, post it to Twitter or open in Safari, all of these work well.

All in all this is a great app made even better by the fact that they managed to get it together right around iPad launch time, at $9.99 it wasn't inexpensive so I am hoping for big things from updates although this does appear to be almost the default price point for iPad native apps at least until we get some real competition in the app store

-- Posted From iPad