The iPhone Is A High Bar

I’ve been looking forward to the iPhone 2.0 OS and the App Store for a fair while, not because there was new functionality I desperately wanted on my iPhone but because having access to native resources should make the few common webapps I use better. I was particularly impressed by Apple’s notification system and looked forward to say having a flag on NetNewsWire showing me how many unread items I had or being able to be notified me when someone sent me an instant message.

Sadly, the launch of the app store for me demonstrated just how much effort Apple put in to polishing their applications and getting them right and just how important it is to get real user feedback during development. None of the applications on the app store that I’ve tried have really impressed me. Most are good applications, but none have really thought through the use cases well, none of rounded off the corners and been polished. In short, none of them are iPhone standard.

The thing is, by Mac software standards they’re all notch applications but the iPhone requires really going the extra mile and getting the whole package right.

NetNewsWire on the iPhone was my biggest disappointment, mostly because NewsGator was my most used webapp and I looked forward to NetNewsWire taking advantage of the extra things an iPhone app could do. Sadly, it simply didn’t add anything over NewsGator except that it downloads everything at the start and is then generally snappy. It doesn’t provide a badge showing the number of unread items which is the one thing an app could have added over NewsGator’s iPhone tuned interface. Worse though, it takes a number of steps backwards – it doesn’t show all your feeds but it also doesn’t show the ones with new items. It shows the feeds that have recently had new items. The net result is that you don’t have access to older unread items and you have to scroll through your feeds to find the unread ones.

Worse, it provides a “Next Unread Item” button but not a “Previous Unread Item”. Sure it removes clutter, but it also means you wind up reading posts in reverse chronological order. With the blogs I read that means reading conversations in reverse.

On the responsiveness front it comes tantalizingly close. I like the fact that it does the downloading upfront and can then let me whizz through all my unread items but if you try to whizz past a post with images you’ll just find yourself coming back to it at the end. Items aren’t marked as read until the iPhone has downloaded every last referenced image in the item. I’m sure there’s another way to mark it as read, but it completely defeats the point of using the next unread item button to quickly flick through feeds.

The synchronization is a major step backwards too. With NewsGator once something is marked as read, it’s read and you can just refresh your feeds with desktop NetNewsWire and it becomes marked as read. With iPhone NetNewsWire that’s not the case. If you open it, whizz through your feeds and close it to do something else, everything you read will be left as unread on the server. Synchronization only happens when you refresh the feeds. This is true of desktop NetNewsWire too but it at least runs in the background (though it’s still annoying if you read your feeds then close your laptop and walk off – you’ll read those feeds again on your iPhone).

Now I know the iPhone NetNewsWire isn’t designed to be full featured and I’m glad it’s not. It’s designed for those times when you’re bored and want to quickly check and maybe read a few feeds. It’s pretty good at that, but wouldn’t the “reading feeds on the train” use case seem important to anyone? Wouldn’t that imply wanting to have synchronization happen rapidly (so you can read right up to the minute the train pulls up and not have to reread stuff when you get into the office)? Wouldn’t that imply wanting to skip things quickly instead of waiting for images to load? After all, you’re doing the same sorting and filtering that you’d do on the desktop, just more likely to clip long articles and read them later.

I really don’t mean to pick on NetNewsWire here, it’s just that I so enjoy using the desktop version because everything is so well thought out that if there was one app on the iPhone that was going to be insanely great it had to be NetNewsWire. I still think it’s the best non-Apple app on the iPhone but I think that’s a shame. We’ll have to wait a while longer before a truly awesome 3rd party iPhone app turns up.

My bet is it will be NetNewsWire 2.0.