Archiving in the trash: The Instapaper UI
virtualpants.com
virtualpants.com
As we can all plainly see, it doesn't.
Instapaper's UI is discoverable and forgiving, which seems far more important than its particular choice of "iconography" when actually interacting with it.
I’m not sure that we would. There are some great designers working on Android apps, but I don’t get the feeling that the UIs get the same critical eye, especially because there is less consistency throughout Android.
Marco should probably have the Archive box and the trash icon in the main list view instead of the trash icon that does both. However, I get the feeling that he doesn’t care as much about the polish of Instapaper as some people do. Last year I sent him an email with a list of adjustments to bring Instapaper in line with how iOS apps should behave (e.g. table view cells should fade out with the back-navigation transition instead of after it), but months later, most of the issues aren’t fixed. It’s the little things that really show polish and he doesn’t seem to be responsive to fixing the little things.
I would find it more likely that, even though (IIRC) the guy handling Instapaper’s support said he would pass it off to Marco, he simply didn’t see my suggestions or ever do anything with them.
This is assuming the stuff is intentional, of course. If it's unintentional, it may simply be a low priority. Whether the UITableViewCell is de-selected during or after the animation is a pretty subtle and innocuous ui artifact that could nevertheless require deep changes under the hood to fix. If I was Marco, I'd weigh the impact of leaving it how it is, with the work required to change it, and probably end up leaving it until next time I reworked that area of my code. One man operations require tradeoffs pretty much all the time.
You can always use Pocket if you can't handle the occasional not-very rough edges this results in.
I always forget which one I want when I want to email a link to a page...
Also irks me every time I use the app, as there is no quick way to archive and move onto the next item.
As a paid app, and a pricey one at that, one expects a little polish.
Grrrrrr make it better Marco!
The idea that using hours that bill at $150-$200 (current stab at journeyman iOS dev rate) to build products that sell "pricey" at anything over $1.99 is a problem. Problem might be the wrong word. Con.
Marco will be fine. Or he won't, I guess. That's not my problem with this line of pricing thinking.
If it was crappy coffee, it would not matter to me if it cost $0.50. I can get crappy coffee for free in the lobby of the parking garage I park at.
Stop encouraging people to burn $150/hr hours making things that are "pricey" if they cost more than a buck.
Whatever Pocket ends up doing, nothing's preventing Instapaper from doing it too.
They may not need to, but as we've seen in the past, you can't assume that that one-time purchase means you're now the customer again (and not the product).
There's no reason to believe that Instapaper won't or doesn't already do everything that you're suggesting Pocket could do.
As it stands:
Pocket (Free), Instapaper ($3.99/$2.99)
Pocket (No ads), Instapaper (ads)
Pocket (Free API), Instapaper (Subscription fee for some API functions)
Unless I'm missing something?
Also, the App Store review certainly doesn't enforce the HIG.
One interesting thing about this design is that if there were separate trash/archive icons, they would probably have confirmation popups, and so the number of taps is the same either way.
There are a lot of stories/comments on HN that I disagree with, but in this case I really don't understand what the problem is at all. Maybe I am missing the point because I'm not using a designated "archive" function and don't realize how much better it is. Is there a reason archiving is better?
Er, what? You don't need to explicitly archive anything in GMail. You can leave everything in your Inbox if you want to. The only folders that get auto-purged are Spam and Trash, where items older than 30 days get deleted.