All About The iPad

Heading back from San Francisco, rather than spend all the flight watching movies on the iPad, I thought I’d take some time to have a play with some of the apps on the iPad and even create some blog posts.

Towards the end of last week, the big news was that Reeder for iPad was now available. I’ve tried NetNewsWire as my RSS reader but ended up liking NewsRack, mainly for the ease of use and the readability of the articles.There was an issue with NewsRack and that concerned the placement of the next button. It just seemed slightly out of reach up there on the top menu.

The choice of RSS reader is quite an important one for the iPad as consuming RSS feeds is one of it’s primary functions (at least for me). First impressions lead me to believe that Reeder for iPad is one of the first applications in the second vanguard of apps launched for the iPad.

The first vanguard were those apps that the developers took a chance on, developing them purely on the iPad simulator, to have them ready for the iPad launch. The fact that the first vanguard apps worked as well as they did, is testament to the skill of the developers. However, some developers decided to wait until the iPad was out in the wild, allowing them to design and test on the actual device.

So on to Reeder.

It’s immediately obvious that the developer has benefited from the experience of using the iPad in designing the application.

In both landscape and portrait mode, the controls fall just where you expect to find them, in a thin margin on the left hand side of the screen. Landscape mode has the usual split screen layout but I much prefer reading in portrait mode, allowing the content to take up the full screen.

At this point, I was just about to start going through all the features, waxing lyrical about how effectively the app has been designed to navigate through your various feeds, how well the designer has utilised multi touch, etc.

In fairness, it’s one of those apps you need to see in action so I’ll feature it on a ScreenCastsOnline show soon. Suffice to say, highly recommended and now my RSS reader of choice for the iPad.