Preview: Instapaper Pro for iPad
- By Charlie Sorrel
- March 24, 2010 |
- 7:36 am |
- Categories: Media Players
Instapaper Pro, our favorite read-later iPhone application here at Gadget Lab, will be available for the iPad on day one. Over at the Instapaper blog, developer Marco Arment has posted screenshots and a great explanation of the problems facing developers without access to an actual, physical iPad.
Instapaper Pro for iPad will be a universal app, a bundle containing code for both the iPad and iPhone. This means that, if the app makes it through Apple’s approval channels, current Instapaper users will never have to see a pixel-doubled version, which “sucked, and it was completely unusable by my standards,” according to Arment.
Being a simple reading application, there aren’t many differences in the interface, which is mostly just text and pictures after all. Arment was wary of making changes without being able to see them in action: “I didn’t want to commit to any huge risks because I don’t have an iPad to test them on,” he says.
The one big change is the horizontal folder view, above. All it does is expose the folders into which your articles are organized (you knew Instapaper has folders, right?), but it looks to be a lot easier and more obvious to use.
Arment plans on making more tweaks when he has an iPad in his hands, but we’re very pleased he decided to go ahead with making an untested Instapaper available at launch. We feel exactly the same way as him about the app: “an iPad without native Instapaper Pro is not a device I want to own.”
Preview: Instapaper on iPad [Instapaper Blog]
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What he said ” Instapaper is coming to iPad very soon. Possibly even on day one — yes, I’m going for it — but that’s optimistic.”
This looks like a cool App and will be on my list of early gets. Interesting to note the developer will be releasing it without having tested it on the actual hardware. I am facing the same problem. The emulator is great, but it is not the real thing, and as I know from iPhone development, just because it works on the iPhone emulator doesn’t mean it will work on the iPhone.