Why Unread Will Never Have a Readability View
One of Unread’s most frequent feature requests is a “Readability View” for articles with truncated RSS content. Unlike the similar feature which “mobilizes” the current web page in the in-app browser, a Readability View displays full article content without the user visiting the original site first. This view is named as such because Readability provides the most commonly-used API for the feature, though it is not the only service to do so.
Back when I was using other RSS apps, I used a Readability View all the time. For example, I subscribed to Paul Krugman’s blog at the New York Times. His writing is great, but blogs at the Times strip their RSS articles down to just one sentence summaries. To read the full content, I had to visit the actual site for every article. This was very inconvenient and contrary to the spirit of RSS. Since a Readability View was only a button tap away, I used it with abandon.
When it came time for me to consider adding a Readability View to Unread, it dawned on me how unfair that feature is to publishers. RSS articles aren’t truncated by accident. They are deliberately truncated so that readers will have to visit the original site. The most likely reason for this is so that readers will be exposed to ads, and possibly interact with them. Whether or not I (as a reader) dislike ads or feel inconvenienced by a truncated feed is irrelevant. A publisher does not owe me an ad-free experience. In many cases, ads are the only viable business model for a publisher.
It’s more important that publishers get paid, so they can continue publishing stuff that I ostensibly want to read. If a site doesn’t offer a full-text RSS feed, then I should either accept that I have to visit their site to read it, or decide that the inconvenience isn’t worth it. Maybe those sites should consider monetizing their RSS feeds with a Daring Fireball style sponsorship.1 Either way, it’s not the place of Unread or any other app to make that business decision on the behalf of publishers.
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Because, let’s be honest, it doesn’t take much work to understand the target demographic for RSS sponsorship ads. ↩
Unread Version 1.2 Launches April 21st
The next update of Unread for iPhone is going to be a huge one. Tons of new features and fixes. Check back here on Monday April 21st for a complete list of what’s new.
Introducing Friday App Design Reviews
Starting next Friday, I will be posting a new weekly feature here on this blog: Friday App Design Reviews. I’m really excited about this.
If you’re an independent iOS developer (like me), or your team is interested in an experienced outsider’s opinion, let me know about your app.1 Every week I’ll choose an interesting submission and share detailed, constructive criticism in the form of long blog post (like this one, but more detailed, and with screenshots).
If you’d prefer a formal, private design review I am available for that as well. I’ll charge you a fair price based on the scope of the project. Public blog post reviews are free of charge.
Either way, shoot me an email with the details about your app. I won’t be able to review every submission, so be sure to help me understand how your app will be interesting to other readers of this blog.
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You can submit someone else’s app, too, if it’s available for sale on the US App Store. ↩
Recap of My Recent Github Goodies
Under the influence of Bryan Irace, an iOS engineer at Tumblr, I’ve open-sourced a lot of handy iOS utilities lately. These are all polished, single-purpose units of code which should be cake to drop into your projects.
JTSImageViewController is like a “light box” for iOS. It’s similar to image viewers you may have seen in apps like Twitter, Tweetbot, and others. It presents an image in a full-screen interactive view. Users can pan and zoom, and use Tweetbot-style dynamic gestures to dismiss it with a fun flick. Don’t force your users to learn yet another set of gestures. Tweetbot’s are the best and should become the canonical reference.
JTSCursorMovement adds convenient gesture recognizers to a UITextView that make it easy to move the cursor forward or backward. Use one finger to move by characters, two fingers by words, and three fingers by paragraphs. JTSCursorMovement works with both plain text and attributed text, and with composed characters like emoji. I use this in all my apps. I wish every app used it.
JTSSmartPunctuation replaces common shorthands composed of dumb punctuation with their smart counterparts. It turns dumb quotes into smart quotes, three consecutive periods into an elipsis, three consecutive dashes into an em-dash, and two consecutive dashes followed by anything but a dash with an en-dash. It’s compatible with right-to-left languages and safe to use with composed character sequences, like emoji. It only scans the immediate vicinity around recent edits, so it should perform well even with very long runs of text.
JTSSemanticReload is a category method on UITableViewController for calling “reloadData” while preserving semantic content offset. Many times you don’t want to use an animated table view update, but you do want to insert new rows above the current content offset. The problem with using reloadData is that it loses the user’s current place in the content. In these situations, use the JTSSemanticReload category instead.
Free Kickstarter Idea: Inkjet Typewriter
About ten years ago I experimented with doing all my personal writing on a used electronic typewriter. Although the experiment was a success, it had one crippling drawback; ink ribbons were consumed much faster than I was expecting, and were hard to replace. Only certain stores carried them. It led me to wonder if a product like this could be possible:
An Inkjet Typewriter
What if instead of obsolete typewriter ribbons, you could refill your typewriter using generic ink jet cartridges? Imagine a slim keyboard, like the Apple Wireless Keyboard, with a carriage-roll portion along the back edge, housing an ink jet write head. It would lay down one letter at a time, with a soft whish. It would be thin and portable, perfect for writing anywhere. And since it uses inkjet cartridges, buying refills would be as easy as a quick walk to the drug store.
Perhaps you could have an alternate version that’s just the carriage roll, which would connect to any Bluetooth-enabled keyboard. Either way, if you see an LCD display, they blew it.
If anyone is so inclined to make this thing a reality, I’d happily consult on the project, free of charge, as long as I get one for myself.