NetNewsWire for iPad
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.
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I believe you can have certain things added to Instapaper automatically (basically subscribe to an RSS feed), but I haven't done so myself. Marco Arment on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/11310264133.
Off topic, but I find it interesting that Gruber hopped onto the "desktop OS X is actually EOL'ed" bandwagon today.
I conflate these legacy Apple platforms, sorry.
I've been wondering about this topic since Snowy's evil release.
I'd wager Gruber is wrong. There's always going to be a healthy market for a keyboard/mouse setup, right? No matter how good Touch OS can get, there's still going to be an enormous hardcore market for the keyboard/mouse setup, and the likeliest path to that setup is through desktop OS X, not through Touch OS, right?
Is my math wrong?
I mean, seriously, is Apple II the correct metaphor here?
I use NNW for skimming and Instapaper for reading. 95% of what ends up in my Instapaper comes from the feeds I'm subscribed to in NNW. If an item's longer than a quick skim, I hot-key it to Instapaper.
@Whitney Young That’s true, but I don’t want to use Instapaper as as feed reader (i.e. do the processing there). It’s not designed for that.
@Chucky I think you’re right that there will be a healthy market for full computers for the foreseeable future. However, it looks like much of the growth (and Apple’s attentions) will be with iPhone OS.
@Erik Ackerman I do that naturally on the Mac. Somehow, on the iPad, it seems like more of a chore to move an item from NetNewsWire to Instapaper. Just enough so that I’m tempted to try to finish reading it in NNW.
I'm not sure how recently you last used NNW for the iPhone, but one of the more recent updates really boosted the sync speed for me. A process that used to take a minute or two now takes 10 to 30 seconds over 3G.
@David Voegtle Indeed, I haven’t used the iPhone version in a while. Good to know. However, part of the problem was with the speed of the full page view, and I imagine that’s still slower on the iPhone.
