Unread 1.8: Split View and Slide Over on iPad, iPhone X, and Readability Improvements

I am excited to announce that Unread 1.8 is now available. This update adds the following improvements:

• Support for Split View and Slide Over on iPad
• Support for iPhone X
• Readability view improvements

Slide Over and Split View on iPad

Unread 1.8 fully supports Slide Over and Split View on iPad.

Support for iPhone X

With this update Unread will look great and work seamlessly on the iPhone X.

This is an article with full-screen reading enabled:

This is an article with full-screen reading disabled:

Readability Improvements

Unread now uses Mozilla’s fork of Arc90’s Readability library. This adds significant improvements to the heuristics used to generate Readability views of articles.

Implementation Notes

• When using Slide Over or Split View on iPad, Unread will also use slightly smaller font sizes if its portion of the screen is narrow.
• Activity text such as “Refreshing all feeds…” and notification text such as “Readability View Loaded” now appears at the bottom of the screen on all devices. Previously activity text would appear instead of the status bar and notification text would appear just underneath the status bar. It is impractical to replace the iPhone X status bar area with a bar of text. In addition such a bar of text at the top of the screen would interfere with the drag handle on iPad with Split View or Slide Over.
• I removed “Classic (Unread)” as an option for the Open Links In setting. This setting resulted in Unread opening links in a legacy in-app browser that predated Safari View Controller. Since Unread no longer supports versions of iOS that lack Safari View Controller and since Safari View Controller provides a much more consistent web browsing experience, it made little sense to continue maintaining this legacy browser.

Bug Fixes

This update also adds some bug fixes, most importantly:

• Tapping the title bar at the bottom of the screen to scroll to the bottom now works reliably on iOS 11.
• There was a bug on iOS 11 where if you selected “Open in Safari” from a share sheet on an iPad while Safari was in a Slide Over window, the screen could be left in an inconsistent state. This is fixed.
• Logging in to Minimal Reader using its emulation of the Fever API now works correctly.

I am excited for this update and thrilled that I am able to provide Split View and Slide Over support as a free update. I started work on Split View and Slide Over support in July, before we even announced that my company was acquiring Unread. If this free update makes you happy, please leave a review.