I was pleased to see the release of a new version of Instapaper Pro for the iPhone yesterday. I’ve been using it more and more of late and often wished it acted more like a book. Heck it looks more like a book than an article on a web page. So what was missing?
Pagination.
Well, thankfully that wish was answered, Instapaper now pages and adds that extra element to the experience of reading saved articles whose appearance is more like a book than a web page. I quickly updated, fired up Instapaper, chose an article, turned pagination on and got confused when I tapped the right edge of my screen. Nothing happened. I checked I’d turned it on properly, I had, so I tried again. Again no page change. I went to tap the pagination icon in the bottom menu bar, missed and hit the bottom of the page (I was tired after a hard week) and the page changed.
Turns out, I’d accidentally discovered the tap zones for a “page turn” were at the top and bottom. A little confused, I closed Instapaper and went to bed. I woke up this morning to find this explanation in my Tumblr dashboard:
Instapaper Pro 2.2’s tap zones for pagination:
I debated about these for a while and tried a few others during development:
Sides only: Didn’t fit with concept of web pages, especially since you can toggle out of pagination mode and scroll manually at any time. The content is…
I can understand it, but it’s not predictable.
Paging to me is directly linked to a book. To turn to a new page in a book you turn from right to left, logically this carries over to eBook apps, like Classics, on the iPhone and a tap to the right side of the screen brings a new page.
Similarly on websites with paged articles, I hate this but it happens, an arrow to the right indicates the second page. On a blog the bottom of an article provides links to the next and previous articles. Their positioning? Previous to the left and next to the right, effectively turning the page.
Having read Marco’s article, I can understand his thinking. He considers each article to be like a web page which scrolls vertically, therefore the tap zones for a page turn make a certain amount of sense. But I wonder how many people did what I did?
The presentation of Instapaper is more like a book than a webpage, and the introduction of pagination reinforces this. Should it not then conform to the general understanding of a page turn moving from right to left?
