If you’ve got The Early Edition for iPad, it’s time to head over to the App Store and check your updates tab because 1.0.2 has just been approved by Apple this morning. Hopefully you’ll enjoy the performance improvements, plus I know a lot of users will be quite happy about the Instapaper and emailing integration.
If you do enjoy the update, we’d really appreciate it if you could take a quick moment to add or update your App Store review here.
And as always, if you have any questions or feedback, please let us know via the Feedback sticky note in the App itself. We love hearing from you guys!
Wow, thank you to everyone who has written to us with feedback about The Early Edition. In the space of just over a week, we’ve had about 150 feedback emails. It takes time to collate all the suggestions and reply to everyone, but it means an awful lot to us that we hear from end users. Many of the emails we’ve received have been really positive and others have been a mixture of feature suggestions and requests for the app to be snappier and more responsive.
So while we work on 1.1 (the much anticipated Google Reader update), we built 1.0.2 to streamline some code and give it a performance boost. While it is under review I decided to do a quick video of it to show you a real life demonstration of the difference. The thing you’ll notice straight away is initial loading time, which is now 3-4 times faster than the current version, plus we’ve scattered other tweaks here and there as well. The app should also generally feel quicker, however there’s still room to improve responsiveness even more.
So thank you to everyone who’s written to us with feedback and we hope you’ll stick with us as we work to improve The Early Edition with each new update.
Just another quick note to customers of The Early Edition for iPad, this time about adding feeds to your News Sources list. Some users have been a bit confused as to why there are a few pages of news on the first day they load the app, but then nothing or very little on subsequent days.
More often than not, the reason for this is that they haven’t added any RSS feeds to the samples that we included by default, and unfortunately the default feeds in 1.0.1 aren’t always updated every day. We assumed that users would be adding their own feeds straight away but some have actually been content reading the sample feeds we provided. As such, when 1.0.2 is approved, there will be more sample RSS feeds and at least a few of them are updated quite frequently throughout each day.
In the meantime, if you still only have the sample feeds in your list, why not try adding a few more to give yourself some extra reading material. Below is a list of feeds that you could try adding to the News Sources list if you’d like an easy place to start:
http://www.engadget.com/rss.xml
http://feeds.gawker.com/gizmodo/full
http://feeds.feedburner.com/TechCrunch
http://feeds.smokingapples.com/Smoking-Apples
http://www.switched.com/rss.xml
http://rss1.smashingmagazine.com/feed/
feed://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/mostviewed
feed://creativebits.org/node/feed
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/rss/news
To add any of these feeds, copy whichever you’d like, then open The Early Edition and tap the ‘+’ button and paste it into the feed text box and press Done.
One last note. We are working on ways to improve feed entry so that it’s less laborious for those who want to follow a lot of RSS publishers. As well as adding Google Reader support, we’d like to make this process simpler generally.
Just a quick post to let customers of the Early Edition for iPad know that we have submitted 1.0.2 to Apple for review. We felt it was important to lay the groundwork for the upcoming 1.1 update with this interim release which is a combination of some user experience enhancements and some really handy new features. The improvements include: better speed and performance; more visual feedback during processes; feed testing; feed editing; feed re-ordering; ability to email links to articles, save articles to Instapaper, open in Safari and copy links to the clipboard; larger full screen article page size; and miscellaneous bug squashes.
We really hope you’ll enjoy this update when it’s approved while we work on 1.1. In the meantime if you have any questions or problems don’t hesitate to email via the Feedback sticky note in the app and we’ll get back to you asap.
Thanks for choosing The Early Edition!
Here’s a quick video of what it was like to be me (about 18th in the queue) at the Fifth Ave Apple Store in NYC last Saturday. All that travel for this moment, but I can honestly say it was worth it. Not just from a developer point of view (and we’re finding that it’s very helpful having the device to test on right now) but just from the overall experience of being at Apple’s flagship store for a product launch of something entirely new.
Awesome.
And here’s a handful of other photos from the gazillions that are now filling up my hard drive:
As I sit here, 34,000 feet in the air and almost 23 hours since departing New York, I thought it would be a good idea to note down my first impressions of Apple’s new device.
One of the first things that struck me is that the iPad is solid. It’s not exactly light, but what I mean is that it just feels like a well built, sturdy product. Some reviewers have been quick to point out that it feels too heavy but if the casing were made of plastic, no doubt there would be as many reviews pointing out how flimsy it is.
After you’ve used it for a while you’ll also realize that the battery just keeps going. When the 3G version ships, the battery life won’t be quite as exciting, but for now I’m more than happy. To give a real life illustration, as I type this post, I’ve already watched a full length movie, played Real Racing, Flight Control and Harbor Master numerous times each, read five comics from Marvel, explored the UI of the default apps and the battery indicator still sits at a juicy 48%.
Another surprise is the difference between perceived and real user experience of some applications. I’ll explain. Prior to actually using the iPad, I looked at the screenshots for apps like Twitterific and thought the developers may have misjudged the scale of their UIs. I guess I also wondered if Twitter apps on the iPad would generally feel like you were trying to cut a steak with a chainsaw – 140 characters on a 1024 x 768 screen seemed like overkill. But once you start using the device you realize that it tends to defy your assumptions and the Twitter example is just one.
The software keyboard takes some getting used to, particularly in portrait mode. The keys are way too tight to touch type, and I found that I ended up using two fingers, (which is actually still quicker than using the iPhone keyboard). In landscape however it is actually possible to touch type, though it does take some practice and very keen focus one what you’re doing.
The display is bright and crisp, giving application graphics excellent sharpness and clarity. The UI is smooth and elegant, seamlessly moving from this to that with style and flair – Apple’s signature.
But easily the most profound thing about the iPad is it’s OS and display size. It’s a new canvas for developers, and what excites you about it today will no doubt be different to what excites you about it in a week from now or a month from now or a year from now, as developers once again explore unchartered territories and create what was once impossible.
