Reeder Calls Out MobileRSS For Design Theft, Community Backlash Begins

I'd be interested in an example or two of what MobileRSS messed up. Just curious - I don't use either of these apps.

I assure you that if you had used both quattro pro and lotus 1-2-3 you wouldn't be thinking that we're discussing the "murky and collaborative nature of creative work" - we're talking about imitation. Interface cloning and heavy borrowing of element layouts has a long and storied history in software design - look at any modern GUI and they all look much more similar than dissimilar. Is that the murky and collaborative nature of creative work? Hell no, it's people copying off of each other. And it's a good thing, unless you think it'd be a great idea to have to retrain everyone every time IT wanted to switch application providers (that used to be common).

Assuming you still disagree, I'd be curious about your opinion of non design issues. Do you think samba is bullshit for having reverse engineered the CIFS interface allowing non windows computers to share on corporate lans? How about various office applications that reverse engineered the file formats of various closed competitors to allow them to save and load the formats? Surely a lot of hard work went into designing CIFS or .xls, should that be off limits as well? If not, why is the location of buttons on a screen a bigger deal than the locations of bytes in a filehandle?

When you are using the resources of an API, you are entering a community. And when you abuse another respected member of the community, it responds.

These bookmarking services weren't cutting off a developer client to protect themselves, which I consider more dangerous. They were throwing their weight behind Reeder.

Checks and balances.

Yes I did click on the link.

The fact that the RSS stories displayed is irrelevant - that is data and not UI. Only looking at design elements: First screen shot:

Black bar across the top - that is presumably from the OS so doesn't count.

Overall layout: both have a navigation bar at the left (fairly standard for RSS readers), similar width (but there is probably an optimal width, and this may be it), the bar is a different colour but on the grey-black range in both cases (probably determined more by the platform). Both have a refresh toolbar button at the bottom - this placement is common for RSS feed readers. Some of the icons and icon placements are similar - how unique this is to the design depends on how common the icon placement is. It is certainly not a blatant copy with no changes, however - some of the positions have changed, and some icons seem to be different.

In terms of the layout of the right-hand side pane with the content, that is completely different. The date is displayed differently, and is repeated on each story in Reeder. The bullet point layout is different, and the MobileRSS version has images.

So it has some similar design elements, most of which are not particularly unique to Reeder, and some differences. They may well have taken some inspiration from their competitor, but they have also made some changes of their own - in other words, the article seems to be a beat-up of legitimate competition. I suspect the free publicity is probably going to end up helping MobileRSS more than it hinders them.