Archive for April 13, 2010

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

NetNewsWire for iPad

Brent Simmons:

The iPad application, within five days, made us more money than the iPhone application has in its existence over the last six months or something. And it’s only priced double, $9.99 versus $4.99. So, that says a few things. One, I think it’s a better application, our application on the iPad. And being there on day one is huge, since everyone’s looking for apps. But, yeah, even with a much smaller user base so far, it’s just done so well.

NetNewsWire on the Mac is great, but I always found the iPhone version disappointing. This is probably not through any fault of Simmons’. It was just too slow and cramped on that hardware. On the iPad, though, it’s plenty fast and seems to fit the screen size well. The Mac version is more efficient for processing and skimming—the wider list view, keyboard shortcuts, and tabs are important—but the iPad version is certainly comfortable to use, especially for reading. I haven’t quite worked out when to use NetNewsWire vs. Instapaper, though. The latter is even better for reading, but of course I have to add pages to it manually.