I took screen shots of NetNewsWire for iPad as I was working on it — and have posted them as a photoset on Flickr.

It’s important to know that this is not about the design process — this is about seeing what it’s like to start from scratch (or near-scratch) and build an app. It’s the production process.

I quit taking screenshots a week or two before we finished, so it doesn’t quite go all the way up to the end. But close enough, I think, to get the idea.

I just uploaded NetNewsWire for iPad 1.0.2 — hopefully it will get into review and on the App Store quickly. This version fixes the disappearing Feeds popover button and fixes a crash that could happen when tapping next-unread or the up/down buttons.

We have Twitter accounts for each of the three NetNewsWire versions — you may already be following one or more. (They’re listed in the sidebar of this weblog.)

You can also follow the accounts of the folks who work on NetNewsWire in various ways. Here they are:

@bradellis is Brad Ellis, who designed NetNewsWire for iPad.

@newsgatortechie and @jennyblumberg are Jenny Blumberg’s accounts. She works on this website, writes documentation, and supports NetNewsWire for iPad (and TapLynx, and will be supporting the other NetNewsWireses too, once I revise them).

@nick_harris is NetNewsWire/iPad’s second programmer. He’s responsible for coding lots of the animations (and a bunch of other stuff, but the animations are the funnest part).

@walkerfenton used to work on Pee-wee’s Playhouse when he was in college. We think that’s cool. It turns out he’s super-smart and stuff, and he’s in charge of media and data services, which NetNewsWire is part of. His collegiate experience has warped him — but in just the right ways.

@brentsimmons is me.

MacStories reviews NetNewsWire for iPad: “The first aspect I’d like to focus on is the interface, which is simply beautiful to me.”

Bakari Chavanu: “The new NetNewsWire interface takes great advantage of the iPad screen, which makes for a better reading experience of downloaded articles and blog posts.”

As part of working on NetNewsWire for iPad, Brad Ellis (the designer) and I produced a UI walkthrough. We wanted to run it by folks and get feedback.

It’s a PDF — you can download it.

(Note: I edited it ever so slightly to remove email addresses and a parenthetical comment that mentioned some future feature ideas.)

What’s interesting to me is that all of the graphics are mockups. Not screenshots. This was only about five weeks ago. (All iPad apps, except for Apple’s, were done very quickly, obviously.)

Also interesting is how close the mockups are to the shipping app. These mockups were the result of about a month of steady design work.

But you will note some differences. The news list rows, for instance, got quite a bit cleaner since the UI walkthrough.

Jesper writes in Sign Me Up: “These people like to customize their applications; replacing graphics and templates even beyond NetNewsWire’s news themes, or why not adding, removing or editing localizations.”

The gist is that, while NetNewsWire for Mac is now code-signed, you can still tinker with it by replacing graphics and resources, since I excluded those things from code-signing.

I added a page on what to do about crashes. Goal one is always stability, and we shipped NetNewsWire without any known crashes, after lots of testing.

However, there was a crashing bug at startup for some people in NetNewsWire for iPad 1.0.

We’ve released 1.0.1, which we hope fixes this bug — it’s on the App Store now. (Go get it if you haven’t already. Open the App Store and tap the Updates tab.)

But no developer can promise that an app of this complexity won’t ever crash. (For one thing, there could be crashing bugs in places the developer can’t control.)

But I can promise that crashes are more serious than dinner or sleeping. And fixing them requires your help: if it crashes, I need your crash logs. It’s the only way I can tell what’s going on.

It still needs to be filled out some more, but there’s enough content to make the frequently-asked-questions page worth posting.

If anything on that page isn’t clear, or if you can’t find the answer to your question, please ask on one of the forums.

We’ve had a few bug reports of a crash-at-startup. Though Apple hasn’t provided crash logs for NetNewsWire yet, we did get a crash log from a friend who reported the same thing.

This morning we fixed the crash and uploaded a new version to Apple. It’s in review and hopefully will appear on the App Store quickly.