Screenshots of Newsprint - a new powerful RSS reader

[sniffies]

My biggest complaints are:

- If one chooses to cache images, one won't be able to start reading articles until the app has finished caching. That's a major flaw!

- Swiping across an article to open the drawer with different options is not responsive at all and sometimes can even take several tries. Also, how come the drawer stays open when scrolling up/down??? Not very intuitive. By the way, one more option is missing: mark read/unread.

- When going from one article to the next one, the transition is soooooooooooooooooo slow, like turtle-slow. Please, improve that. Look at Reeder's faaaast transition.

- The font in the articles overview is so freakin' small. Make it damn bigger.

- When touching the Edit button, red 'minus' circles appear/disappear abruptly. Change that. Looks very unpolished. I don't understand what your "beta testers" were testing. Awful.

- Full-screen reading is crucial since you decided to make article headlines stationary/unmoving. At least, touching the top bar should hide the article headline in order to gain more space for reading. Or why not make it scrollable altogether??? Otherwise, a weird decision of yours.

- When viewing an article, there is a button to mark it unread. Good! But how come the button doesn't automatically revert to saying "mark read" after tapping on it. Logical, no? Of course!

- How come images within articles don't automatically resize to fit??? Having to scroll left/right is very very awkward. Expanded images could be viewed in browser.

- Lastly, the app feels sluggish overall. Feels as though it's still in an alpha stage. Seriously.

Bottom line: your app is nowhere better than Reeder (the best), or the outdated-by-centuries Byline, or even MobileRSS, which is mediocre. Again, what ever were your "beta testers" testing???

 

[Fedorov]

Totally agree with the above post - you've raised quite a few similar ones to me and in a nutshell Reeder is lightyears ahead of it.
I agree, don't know what the beta testers were doing, I dare anyone who thinks they can use this everyday to go try Reeder and then convince me otherwise.
Reeder has speed, super smooth transitions and scrolling, maximises screen space and is so easy on the eyes, minimal touches required to do anything.
Sorry, I'm quite disappointed that I bought Newsprint in it's current state and I'm afraid to say the low ratings it is getting are due to lack of proper testing and releasing it before it was ready to compete with the bigger boys...

I really hope I can be proved wrong within a few updates though

 

[JustLeft]

Thanks Fedorov and PBF! You have saved me money and more importantly, time. I will wait for the updates. Reeder is working great for me.

Totally agree with the above post - you've raised quite a few similar ones to me and in a nutshell Reeder is lightyears ahead of it.
I agree, don't know what the beta testers were doing, I dare anyone who thinks they can use this everyday to go try Reeder and then convince me otherwise.
Reeder has speed, super smooth transitions and scrolling, maximises screen space and is so easy on the eyes, minimal touches required to do anything.
Sorry, I'm quite disappointed that I bought Newsprint in it's current state and I'm afraid to say the low ratings it is getting are due to lack of proper testing and releasing it before it was ready to compete with the bigger boys...

I really hope I can be proved wrong within a few updates though

 

[LostLogik]

Quite a slating, PBF, and one I feel not entirely justified.

1. Caching. Yes, you have a valid point here. If caching is on one is effectively locked out of the app until caching is finished. Not clever. One should at least be able to read what is already saved. I'd not picked up on that as, almost always in wifi the last couple of days, didn't have caching turned on. As it stands, this does need sorting. If on a slow connection it could be ages before one could actually get to read something. It would also be good to have an indication of what feed is being updated, rather than the current plain message "caching".

2. Drawer features. Never used them, in any app that has them. I tend to use my iPhone one-handed and swiping to open the drawer of icons with a thumb has always seemed too much hassle. Much easier to just tap a couple of icons/menu items. That said, there should be more in the drawer (hey, I'm a poet and didn't know it ) but as to opening it, it seems no worse than any other I've come across.

3. Article transition speed. Disagree here. I don't think it's as slow as you imply. In fact I timed it compared with some other readers and found it comparable and certainly not unuseable. If there's a picture in the new article then yes, there will be a small delay as the picture renders but that's the same for any I've tried. The transition could be smoother though, there is a decimate two step approach to the whole thing.

4. Font size. I actually like the small font. I'm fed up with apps that are made for my grandmother. It's nice to be able to get a lot of text on screen instead of big frickin letters. No complaint from me here. I think the whole UI look is leaps n bounds ahead of any other.

5. Press Edit and the red minus buttons immediately appear. Nit picking minutiae? Can't see anything wrong with that. Press edit and edit buttons appear. What I would expect, especially noting your earlier complaint about transition speed.

6. Full screen necessary. Disagree given font size, enough can be read. OK it might be nice to have scrolling off but hey, not a weird choice as it stands.

7. Mark read button should switch to mark unread (or visa versa). Agreed.

8. Image resizing. Maybe. I find that a lot of the time when an image is resized it's too small to see properly. But I can see that an option should be available. However, I know plenty of readers where image resize didn't appear in v1 of the app, so I'm not going to pan the dev over it.

Yes, there are some things that can be improved with this app but it is v1 and slamming the lack of beta testing for features is hardly a great call. For me, this is a better reader than the others from a looks perspective. Missing features should, I hope and expect, will get added in an update or two. If not, then I'll pan the dev. But for the moment I'm happy with it and using it as my main reader (but I would like background caching sorted pdq).

 

[sniffies]

I don't think I'm sleeping tonight. LOL

Anyways:

1. √

2. If you never use the feature, fine with me. But it is there, so it'd better function well for EVERYONE (that's what beta-testing is for). Once again, swiping is NOT responsive on this thing. You clearly have never tried swiping across in Tweetie or MobileRSS, which has been perfect since version one.

3. What??? Have you ever tried Reeder??? Please, do not tell me you see almost no difference in transition speed! Totally absurd!

4. We're not on the same page here, darlin'. I'm talking about the articles overview screen. That font IS small.

5. Exactly! That's called nitpicking over tiny details. I'm a perfectionist by nature. I paid five freakin' dollahz for it after all.

6. Scrollable article headlines = good decision!
Unmoving article headlines that take up half the screen = yup, you guessed it right!

7. √

8. My main issue here is not solely image resizing. It's rather the left/right scrolling that is caused by unfitting images. Name me one reader that had the left/right scrolling issue in version one. None.

Bottom line: Five dollars wasted at this point. App deleted for now. Back to Reeder (#1), Byline (#2) and MobileRSS (#3).

Thank you for reading my rant.

 

[ntrigue]

I don't think I'm sleeping tonight. LOL

Anyways:

1. √

2. If you never use the feature, fine with me. But it is there, so it'd better function well for EVERYONE (that's what beta-testing is for). Once again, swiping is NOT responsive on this thing. You clearly have never tried swiping across in Tweetie or MobileRSS, which has been perfect since version one.

3. What??? Have you ever tried Reeder??? Please, do not tell me you see almost no difference in transition speed! Totally absurd!

4. We're not on the same page here, darlin'. I'm talking about the articles overview screen. That font IS small.

5. Exactly! That's called nitpicking over tiny details. I'm a perfectionist by nature. I paid five freakin' dollahz for it after all.

6. Scrollable article headlines = good decision!
Unmoving article headlines that take up half the screen = yup, you guessed it right!

7. √

8. My main issue here is not solely image resizing. It's rather the left/right scrolling that is caused by unfitting images. Name me one reader that had the left/right scrolling issue in version one. None.

Bottom line: Five dollars wasted at this point. App deleted for now. Back to Reeder (#1), Byline (#2) and MobileRSS (#3).

Thank you for reading my rant.

+1

 

[LostLogik]

One thing that does strike me with concern is how silent the dev, who was quite apparent before release, is strangely silent at the moment.

 

[Fedorov]

I'm hoping that means v1.1 is in rapid production

 

[superstrikertwo]

After reading all these reviews about issues and such I can't justify paying $4.99 for the app. .99 - 1.99 perhaps once all the issues are fixed.

 

[ougum]

Wirelessly posted (iPod Touch: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16)

After reading all these reviews about issues and such I can't justify paying $4.99 for the app. .99 - 1.99 perhaps once all the issues are fixed.

Maybe it'll be worth $5.00 onece they fix it. I had no problem with the price.

 

[LostLogik]

Wirelessly posted (iPod Touch: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16)



Maybe it'll be worth $5.00 onece they fix it. I had no problem with the price.

Likewise. This schoolboy mentality that everything has to be 99c bugs me no end.

 

[alent1234]

Likewise. This schoolboy mentality that everything has to be 99c bugs me no end.

over 50 million iphone/touch users. ipad is coming soon

low price means less perceived risk from a customer's opinion. i'll rarely buy a $50 PC/console game due to the risk it sucks. so i wait a long time for reviews, fixes, etc.

but i'll buy a $.99 app a lot of times and if i don't like it then i won't care since it's only $1

 

[Fedorov]

+1 Agree

But let's not turn this into the usual price/cheapo discussion with apps, I'd just like to see Newsprint deliver on some of these "Pro" features and believe it has the potential to do so once some of the issues are resolved.

 

[LostLogik]

Yeah, 5 bucks, big perceived risk. But I digress. I'll echo Fedorov's comments. Let's see how the dev sorts this out.

 

[apporacle]

One thing that does strike me with concern is how silent the dev, who was quite apparent before release, is strangely silent at the moment.

If you by dev mean me, there must be some misunderstanding, I am not the dev, I am responsible for the design of the app. The dev is busy improving the app for 1.1 (including folders, better sync ect. )

 

[tico24]

The dev is busy improving the app for 1.1 (including folders, better sync ect. )

The dev would be much better off just fixing the bugs first. Once you've got a stable build THEN add features.

I know for a fact that Apple are taking a matter of hours to approve apps at the moment, there's no excuse to leave reported high-priority bugs out in the wild for so long.