What’s wrong with NetNewsWire on the iPhone
So, I’ve been suffering through the crappy mobile NewsGator site while gnashing my face off waiting for a native NetNewsWire on my iPhone. Last Friday, I got it, and I’d almost prefer the mobile site.
One issue is speed. It’s not very fast. It’s not unusable, but it is irritating. I’m not going into that, because I don’t think that’s very interesting, and I can’t analyze why it’s slow. What does bother me greatly is the UI, so let’s take a look at that.
On the feed list screen, they chose to use large fonts for the feed names. It looks odd to my eye, and this is the only place in the app where they’re used. I’d prefer to see more consistent type in these lists. Also, feed names overlap the badge showing the unread count, which looks bad.
Feeds with no unread items appear in the list; the only visual difference is the lack of the badge on the right. With the small screen of the iPhone, this is a terrible waste of real estate; nearly half the displayed items are just wasting pixels. The desktop version of NNW can sort feeds in order of most-unread to least-unread. That – or some other setting to get those out of the way – would be a big improvement.
Lastly, there’s the Account button. This lets you change the name of your iPhone in the online sync services, as well as change your username and password. This is a prime candidate for moving to the Settings application, since it’s only used at setup time and very infrequently thereafter.
On the list of items in the feed, the unread count is appended to the feed title in parentheses. When you have a feed with a long name, the unread count is not visible, since the title is truncated, and the count is at the very end.
Items which have been read appear in gray, while those which are unread appear blue. The distinction, particularly when reading in the daylight, is too subtle. Adopting the blue dot used in Mail (for unread messages) and iPod (for new podcasts) would be easier to see, as well as being consistent with the stock applications.
There is a “Mark all as read” button. This works as advertised, but could be improved. On the mobile site, this takes you back to the list of feeds, and this seems like good behavior to have here, too. Once you read everything in a feed, the feed should be hidden from the feed list.
There is no way to jump from one feed to another. You must go back to the list and choose a different feed, which feels clumsy.
Examining an item in a feed reveals still more interface blunders. The feed’s unread count is, once again, appended to the feed title, causing the same problem as on the item list screen.
The “Open in Safari” button makes no sense. From it’s placement on the single item view, one would assume it to open the item in Safari. Counterintuitatively, it opens the feed’s home in Safari. There does not appear to be any way to open a specific item in Safari.
Tapping the item title or any link in it’s body opens that in the embedded web view of NetNewsWire. This is convenient, but reveals many more problems.
There are no back/forward buttons in the embedded view. This is a problem, since tapping a link follows it – there is no way to go back. Double-tapping to zoom is quite dangerous, since you often end up tapping a link in the page content which is too small to see. There is also no stop button, so once you do that, you have no choice but to go back and start over.
Which reveals still more problems. When you tap the back button in the top-left of the page, it returns you two levels, back to the item list, rather than the item you were looking at.
Jumping to the bottom, there’s a plus icon. This slides a panel up which prompts you to add the item to your clippings. The dialog contains two buttons. “Add to Clippings” and “Cancel.” If you clip an item, then tap the icon again, you’re prompted to clip it once more. This leads to confusion as to whether the item was, in fact, clipped. Further, there is no reason this requires a full dialog. A simple clip icon which toggles between clip and unclip would suffice. Worst, though, there is no way to read your clipped items from either the mobile site or the application.
The “Next Unread” button works how you’d think. It would be nicer to have up/down arrows like Mail. There is no way to go to the previous item, aside from going back to the list view and reselecting it.
Less obvious is how items are marked read as soon as you view them. When you load an item, NNW starts marking it as read in the background. You see a spinner in the lower-right corner; NNW is sending the status to the server in the background, then it decrements the count. It takes a few seconds if you’re stuck on EDGE. I think it would be better to decrement the number sooner, then send the status in batches. This how it works already if you’re offline; counts drop instantly, then the remote status is updated automatically when you have signal again.
Another nitpicky problem is that the state isn’t completely restored when you quit and come back – when accidentally launching Safari to read a feed’s home page, for example. The item you come back to is always scrolled to the very top, rather than to the position you left it at. This can be irritating when you’re halfway through a longer post.