Elegant Chaos

Over the holidays I've been messing about with the iPhone SDK, just for the hell of it.

I always prefer to have a project in mind when learning new tools, but I didn't have much time, so I fairly randomly decided to do a little countdown application - something that tells you how long you've got before Christmas (for some reason this topic was on my mind).

The app itself was pretty simple to get going (less than a day), and doing the UI for the preferences has proved to be far more time consuming than the actual functionality! Once again I've been reminded how much fun it is to work with Objective-C / Cocoa.

If this had actually been intended as a commercial prospect, I'd have checked the iPhone store first, but luckily I always viewed it as a made-up project for test purposes only. Having said that I thought that I might conceivably post it to the store, just for the hell of it, so I went to have a look at the competition.

I figured that it was a totally unoriginal idea, so there'd probably be a few up there already. I wasn't prepared, however, for there to be about forty! What's more, I'd say that over half of them are paid apps (though costing only a dollar in all cases).

This is quite boggling, and it makes one wonder. Does anyone ever pay for these apps? Some of them have reviews, in some cases quite positive reviews, which suggests that they do. There are supposed to be more iPhones out there than Xbox 360s and PS3s put together. That's quite a big market, but is it really big enough for 40 applications competing for a tiny and almost pointless niche? I'd love to know if anyone has sold more than 100 copies.

I guess the moral of the story is to check the store before you put any serious time into an application. Although, perhaps not. Perhaps the moral is to check the store, rip off the good features of your competition, then do the app anyway because it's a big, big, market. Or maybe not!

Tom Smith really doesn't seem to be having much joy with his iPhone.

I, on the other hand, love mine (despite the occasional glitch, random departure of what appeared to be a fully charged battery, or stupid loss of preferences when upgrading).

This may be something to do with the fact that Tom seems to have about 100 third-party apps installed on his, and I (remembering the days of OS 9 extension madness all too well) have about 10 on mine.

I suspect though that it's all about expectations and the managing thereof.

I can't speak for Tom, but all I really wanted from my iPhone was something that replaced my old iPod and phone, and by the way was a better internet device than my previous Sony Ericsson not-at-all-smart phone. Expectations well and truly met.

Throw in the fact that I've now got always-on, eat-as-much-as-you-can data access wherever I am (yes, at super slow 2G speeds - so what? How fast can you read RSS feeds anyway?), and I am a happy bunny.

Apart from the bloody recessed headphone socket of course, which is right pain in the arse.

For what it's worth, my list of apps, in rough order of usage:

• NetNewsWire (news)
• Things (to do)
• iFooty (footy news)
• TubeStatus (travel news)
• Remote (kewl)
• Palringo (chat)
• LastFM (music)
• OmniTuner (making music)
• VNC (nerdery)
• Facebook (social)
• Stanza (ebooks)
• eReader (ebooks)
• Light (illumination!)

On the subject of MarsEdit... I've been more than a little disappointed with the iPhone version of NetNewsWire (if you don't know the connection, you haven't been using a Mac long enough ;) ).

Admittedly my list of feeds is a bit bloated (typically I have between 1000-2000 unread items, which I have no doubt is actually a comparatively small number by Tom Smith's standards).

However, I've found NetNewsWire to be slow, crash-prone (although definitely improved with the 2.1 os upgrade, so maybe we can blame Apple for that one), and generally not very smart about the way it works.

On the whole I think I prefer the NewsGator iPhone site, which essentially does the same job in a browser - but only because it gets me there quicker, not because the interface is necessarily better (in some ways it is worse).

In the unlikely event that Brent Simmons is reading this, here's my quick fire list of how you could improve NNW on the iPhone:

• allow me to order my list of feeds; alphabetical is so not how I want to read my news

• give me a way to read the previous item; sometime I click "next" too soon...

• update the unread counts quickly; surely you can cache the list of unread items on the server and download them first, before refreshing the actual articles?

• fetch stuff from the feeds that are empty first; I have a few feeds I read a lot, and a lot of feeds I read rarely. The rare feeds already have tons of unread stuff in them. The popular feeds are empty, because I've sucked 'em dry! Refresh those ones first please.

• fetch the articles in a more just-in-time manner; I know this may be trickier given the format of feeds, but it ought to be possible to just start by fetching one or two articles, then get the next one whilst I'm reading, and so on. I often seems like I'm waiting a long time just to find out if there's anything to read

• be a bit smarter about moving on to the next feed or category; I have a bunch of Mac related feeds grouped together into a folder - I often find myself moved on to another folder, only to go back and discover that somehow a bunch of unread items in the Mac folder got skipped

• mix things up a bit; off the top of my head I can't remember whether the feed formats give dates per item, or just an update time for the feed, but I'd quite like to view a bunch of related feeds together in a mixed up order; in other words, it would be quite nice not to have to read all the Register articles, then Slashdot ones, then the TUAW ones, etc - juble them together a bit, sorted by posting date if possible

• spot and remove duplicates; sometimes I end up with the same story twice because I subscribe to a main feed and a filtered version of it. It would be good if NNW could spot the duplicates and mark them as read for me