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Comment by asd | Hacker News Reader

I think I now know why Reddit was so generous with all of the Gold. The app, although very fast and responsive on iOS, lacks many of the features that Alien Blue had. I could find zero integrations with any third party services. The cool thing about Alien Blue is, if I was a stoplight and didn't have time to read a linked article, I'd just add it to Pinboard and get back to it later.

Another major failing - there isn't an option to always open links in your browser of choice. At least use a Safari View Controller, for pete's sake.

EDIT: It looks like I can choose to share a link with the ... menu option. I can then share to my Pinner "Quick Save" option to save to Pinboard. Not sure how I missed it.

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They were generous with the gold because they're probably going to shut AlienBlue down. AB doesn't have any ads, they can't make money off those users.

Uh...what are you talking about? AlienBlue has sponsored posts that show up in the feed. It is incredibly annoying too. Unless it is because they screwed up the whole "pay for AlienBlue" thing they did a while back and I wasn't supposed to be seeing ads this whole time despite having paid...

My guess though is that this new version will have more of a focus on ads and monetization for sure.

They're not shutting AlienBlue down, but they removed it from the App Store, and they are not updating it anymore.

They can shut it down by changing the reddit API so it no longer works, thus forcing users to switch to the new app.

If they do that, they would break every 3rd party reddit app, which reddit said they wouldn't do. Of course, that doesn't mean their position will change in the future.

no, they could just disable the AB API key...

Ugh. So disappointed.

would you prefer homebrew integration or standard ones through the ios share apis?

Ideally, the iOS share apis. I use the Pinner app and they have two ways to save to pinboard via the share apis- a "quick pin" method where you click once and forget it (what I usually do) and the regular way, where you can add tags, etc.

k good. i never really liked that alien blue was sort of half and half. and the save picture button was broken, but the ios share save picture worked.

I know Alien Blue is feature-packed, but I have always found it difficult to use.

The only thing I ever struggled with in AB was trying to visit a specific subreddit. Having to go back to the menu and scroll through all of my subscribed subs (which didn't seem to be sorted in any particular order, and included many subs I used to subscribe to years ago but don't anymore) to find the "enter subreddit manually" button was not terribly intuitive.

FWIW, you can sort the list of subreddits alphabetically at the top of the subreddit list.

I think the GUI wasn't that great, but the features were quite usable and helpful.

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