Noel Rappin Writes Here

No links post this morning, maybe later today. Meantime, enjoy me blathering abouta a couple of substitutions in my iPad dock:

Position: RSS Reader

Incoming: Reeder

Outgoing: NewsRack

An easy call. NewsRack is nice, but Reeder is:

• Smoking fast.

• Without a limit on downloaded articles per feed

• Much more accurate on sync – NewsRack has problems if you go back and forth and old, unread articles pile up and never get marked unread.

• With an option to put the oldest item first

• Damn pretty

The only real problem I have with Reeder is that some of it’s gesture functions are a little opaque, and there’s no in-app help. It’d also be nice if they did something more visually interesting with the topmost level page – each subfolder is basically just a grey rectangle. A montage of favicons from the folder would be cool. Other than that, it’s really great so far.

Position: Twitter Client

Incoming: Osfoora HD

Outgoing: Twitteriffic

I swore I wasn’t going to buy a Twitter client, what with Tweetie/Twitter due Real Soon Now, but I was pursuaded.

Twitter is weird on the iPad, probably the only thing I do on the iPad whose natural window on my desktop is smaller than the iPad screen. As such, I don’t think that any of the Twitter clients on the iPad really feel right yet. (TweetDeck’s multiple columns don’t quite look good to me, and I haven’t tried Twittelator’s desktop-y screen). Osfoora has two big advantages over Twitteriffic. It manages the case where your number of unread tweets is over 200 nicely (just like Tweetie/Twitter), something that Twitteriffic has never done gracefully in any of its mobile incarnations. Osfoora also splits @replies into their own space, which I prefer.

That said, it’s three, count ‘em, three taps to open a link in the in-app browser, and that’s at least one too many. I’m not sure I like the “show the current tweet really big” method of getting at deeper functionality, but I guess it’s a bigger-screen analogue of Tweetie’s sweep to show. Still, it’s got a lot of features and it’s not unpretty, so I’m sticking with it for a while.