Tilt Scrolling in Instapaper Pro

It’s such a simple idea: exploit the power of the iPhone’s accelerometer as an alternate means to control scrolling on the vertical axis of a page.  

Previously the only method of scrolling has been grabbing the screen with your Cheetoh-stained finger and dragging.  It’s a tried-and-true model which has held a firm place in the UI language along with its desktop-based cousins the mouse-based scroll wheel, the on-screen scroll bar, the up-and-down arrows and a number of other lesser-used options such as grab-and-drag.  Yet on the iPhone, touch scrolling has had no viable competitor.  As simple and elegant in theory as Tilt Scrolling sounds, no application (according to Instapaper’s developer Marco Arment) has implemented it.

Marco has implemented Tilt Scrolling in the newly-released $9.99 Pro version of Instapaper (the Free version has been in the App Store since almost the beginning), and its implementation is intuitive and functional.  In fact, I wouldn’t mind having Tilt Scrolling in Mobile Safari.

After more than a year of owning and using the iPhone, it gets me all excited that people are still digging into its UI conventions and coming up with new ways of interacting with it.  And I’m certain there’s much more of this to come.

Almost as impressive as the feature itself is its introduction in the brief promotional page included in Instapaper Free.  A simple description of the feature is accompanied by a large green button linking to a demonstration video that opens and plays from within in Mobile Safari.  Like everything else in this application, it’s well thought out and concise.

Find out more about Instapaper Pro by visiting the site.

Aug 31 2008 4:05pm