Unread for iPhone is one of the best iPhone apps available today. It provides the best reading experience on the iPhone and is an absolutely joy to use. Today, Jared Sinclair brings us Unread for iPad. It has been a privilege to use Unread on iPad from the early betas and the final product is nearly perfect.
Unread for iPad takes the brilliant experience of Unread to a larger screen. Fonts look amazing, the themes are mostly great, with a few exceptions in the unlockable themes. Unread translates really well to the portrait iPad orientation. While most of the iPad app is the same as the iPhone app in terms of wireframe, the subtle changes really help. Swiping to the left from any screen brings up the action menu and the touch targets here are much bigger. This is awesome, because fat fingers. I only wish the menu would be position aware of your swipes so that you can reach the buttons with minimal hand movement. Jared has been a stickler for great single handed use on his iPhone apps. Unread and Riposte on iPhone make that very evident. On the iPad side of the things, two thumbed use is akin to single handed use on an iPhone. The main article list on iPad has the headline and other information on the left and a short intro on the right to make better use of the larger screen. This two column layout looks great in portrait mode but I’m not a big fan of how it looks in the landscape mode. Both columns are part of a single touch target so getting to the article is easy with either thumb. Unread for iPad is one of the few apps that scrolls perfectly on my iPad 3. I was pretty amazed at the performance this app has on my old iPad. The performance is perfect in every way on newer devices, but scrolling being great on an iPad 3 is quite an achievement given some of Apple’s own apps don’t scroll that well on it. Unread sports some great little features like double tap an article to toggle read status, proper linked list domain support and a great implementation of a browser for web views of articles.
Unread for iPad is not as feature complete as Mr Reader and I now use both apps for RSS. Mr Reader is great for triaging and working on your list quickly if you subscribe to loads of feeds and Unread now provides the best reading experience. Unread for iPad is a near perfect RSS app. I woke up today at around 7AM to a message stating the app had released and instantly bought it. I think you should too. Unread for iPad is available on the App Store for just $4.99.