TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Rands:

I fall in love with newsreaders like I fall in love with productivity systems. The love affair lasts for three weeks and then I move back to reading via Tab Groups and keeping track of my day on a piece of paper. There’s an important lesson about human nature for both application domains that is going to make someone a pile of money.

Interestingly, I’ve fallen in love with Reeder for iPad in a way I never have with NetNewsWire. While NetNewsWire is a great application—utilitarian, unemotionally functional—Reeder is wonderfully functional and emotional. Reeder on the iPad feels tactile, like I’m reading a real piece of paper.

Part of it is the unique aesthetic and wonderful reading environment, but something much more interesting is how you interact with the application. Reeder reduces abstractions between you and the content—less controls, more… real things. While reading an article in portrait mode, for example, to move back to the article list, you don’t press a back button. You move the article page over to the right, which reveals the articles list.

Every time I do that, I get that odd twinge of excitement in my stomach, the one I get when I come across something unexpectedly perfect. That’s what the iPad offers: it’s not only a digital replacement for paper, but it can capture that same feeling printed works has.