A new version of River of News is coming

It's been too long!

I'm excited to be working on River of News again. A lot of people have asked why I disappeared and I'll write about that in another post. This one is about the product.

Version 1.6 is nearly complete. The big feature in this release is Readability integration. Readability is dear to my heart because their goal is to "deliver a great reading experience wherever you are." I've been using their tools forever to reduce clutter and make the web better. Apple likes them, too, because Readability's technology is the basis for the Reader function in the Safari.

First of all, you'll be able to send your articles to your Readability account to read later on any device. This is a win by itself and you should check out the Readability service if you aren't using it. It's free and the apps are very well done.

But what I'm most excited about is the ability to insert the full article in your River of News stream, even for blogs that that only provide partial text. For example, let's say you subscribe to the always interesting LifeHacker. It looks like this:

The feed only shows a little bit of text. To read it you have to go into the browser and then back to the feed. It's a lot of changing screens and ruins the River of News concept.

With the upcoming version you can press the couch icon at the bottom of the article or, even better, do a quick two finger tap and a moment later it looks like this:

It's a great feature and I love it. Coming soon.

Retina tease

Version 1.5 of River of News is just about ready to be submitted to the App Store. I wanted to give you a teaser shot of the gorgeous new retina graphics.

You can also see the much nicer feed icons. With this version you'll get icons for more of your feeds and they'll be higher resolution and support transparency.

River of News updated in the App Store

Version 1.4.1 is live in the App Store. It contains bug fixes and stability improvements. Thank you for your patience.

I've also got a feature update coming soon with a little sneak peak to the left.

Updated and on sale

This week, River of News was updated in the App Store to version 1.4. I'm very happy with the iOS 5 rewrite. This is the best River of News, yet.

Below are highlights.

✭ Rewritten to take advantage of iOS 5
✭ Better scrolling and responsiveness
✭ Tweet with new iOS 5 interface
✭ Many bug fixes and stability improvements


I've put the app on sale to celebrate. River of News will be on sale for $1.99 (or international equivalent) through Friday. Tell your friends. It's 2 bucks! McDonalds charges more for an iced coffee.

Want to beta test River of News?

I'm just about ready to start testing the iOS 5 updates. Please sign up with Test Flight at the link below.

[edit: beta slots have been filled]

Thank you! I appreciate your feedback.

iOS 5 updates coming soon

I'm sorry for problems that River of News is having in iOS 5. One work-around that you can use for now is to change the font settings to Small and Modern. This will fix the problem of the article titles being small and the articles not formatted properly.

I had a version ready for the iOS release that fixed the problems and worked very well on my iPad 2. Then I tested on a first generation iPad with the final version of iOS. I was surprised that it wasn't stable on the iPad 1. This is the first time I've experienced a notable difference between the iPad 1 and 2 with River of News.

After some frantic work and a number of late nights I've isolated the problem and am progressing towards a solution. Apple made significant changes that are only evident on the iPad 1.

These changes are painful but, ultimately, they make things better and I'm expecting River of News to be faster and more responsive when this is completed. I'm really sorry that I let you down and didn't have a fully working version in the App Store for the release of iOS 5.

Estimate the sales of any app

While I was developing River of News I looked around for any discussion I could find where developers revealed their sales or the relation of ratings to sales. I found several sources independently say that about 1 in 30 buyers of a paid app will rate it in the store. I now have two apps in the store and that ratio has held up remarkably well.

I'm sure there are exceptions and my information is far from comprehensive, but I have enough evidence to believe that multiplying the number of ratings in the U.S. App Store by 30 will give you a ballpark estimate of the sales of an app.

I'm curious to hear from other developers if this ratio is accurate for their products.