Quick Reads 1.0.4 is a beefy iPad update

Quick Reads for iPhone and iPad 1.0.4 is rolling out on the App Store now, and I didn't bump the version that much, but this is the biggest update yet for iPad users.

The iPad app got some serious love

Truthfully, I don't use the app on an iPad that much myself, so the app was mostly optimized around the iPhone experience. However, I know lots of people use this sort of app primarily on an iPad, and it needed to get some love. So I forced myself to use the iPad every day for a week and use the app as much as possible. You won't be surprised to hear this revealed quite a few paper cuts that shouldn't have been there in the first place.

As such, the app now has a real split view layout, you can drag articles onto lists in the sidebar to move them around, and you can multi-select articles and archive, delete, or tag them in bulk. Mouse users get proper hover states, and if you have a keyboard attached, you can drive more of the app from it. Every keyboard shortcut now lives in the menu bar too.

Chris, this one's for you. 😉

Real search

Across both the iPhone and iPad, search got a big upgrade. The app previously just searched things cached locally, but now it performs real-time lookups to the server, so anything you've ever saved should be accessible. I'll talk about it in another post, but I recently shipped an update to how the server performs searches and radically improved performance and ranking of results. The iOS app benefits from these updates as well.

Sign in without an API key

When I shipped the app, I expected users to generate an API key on the website and paste it into the app. That works fine, but it's not exactly the sort of thing you'd expect from a Premiere app, and I wanted to have a better onboarding experience. As such, I've implemented a sort of single sign-on solution in the web application that allows me to have a simple connect button in the app. You tap it, it opens your browser, and you can connect your account from the browser to the app. No copying API keys anymore.

All the small things

There's a lot more in here too: a scrubbable audio bar for text-to-speech, an offline banner so you know when you're working locally, sharper favicons in your article list, delightful empty states, better reduce motion support, more and nicer haptics, and a bunch of dark mode fixes.

If you're a Quick Reads user, the update is live now. If you're not, now's a great time to give it a look.