More, faster!

I read the App Store reviews. I'm all up in your Twitters. I find every feedback source I can to help me understand what my customers think about River of News. One of the complaints is that the app doesn't load enough articles and you have to wait while it fetches more. Many people have helpfully written to suggest that the articles should be pre-loaded before you scroll to the bottom of the current batch.

I hear you and the performance characteristics of River of News aren't because of inattentiveness on my part. I spent a lot of time fine tuning the app to squeeze everything possible from what is a pretty limited piece of hardware. The memory is the main limitation as River of News is effectively building huge web pages of concatenated articles. Along with this is slow rendering. I'll tell you a little secret. If you are on a fast network then most of the time you see a spinner in River of News it isn't loading data - it's waiting for the HTML to render. If you pay attention to Safari when it loads large, complicated web pages you'll see that it's quite conservative in how long it waits until it actually shows you much. When you scroll you'll also see the checkerboard pattern as it tiles in new content because it can't fit it all in memory.

Anyway, I'm writing this post because I have good news. iOS 4.2 changes everything. Apple's rules prevent me from discussing details and things might change. But right now it looks a lot better for River of News. I'm able to tune things differently so the infinite scrolling is more transparent and you rarely see a loading spinner to fetch new articles. This is more like what I envisioned when I started this project. I'll have an updated version ready for the release of iOS 4.2 and I think you'll be happy with the results.