I'm excited to be working on River of News again. A lot of people have asked why I disappeared and I'll write about that in another post. This one is about the product.
Version 1.6 is nearly complete. The big feature in this release is Readability integration. Readability is dear to my heart because their goal is to "deliver a great reading experience wherever you are." I've been using their tools forever to reduce clutter and make the web better. Apple likes them, too, because Readability's technology is the basis for the Reader function in the Safari.
First of all, you'll be able to send your articles to your Readability account to read later on any device. This is a win by itself and you should check out the Readability service if you aren't using it. It's free and the apps are very well done.
But what I'm most excited about is the ability to insert the full article in your River of News stream, even for blogs that that only provide partial text. For example, let's say you subscribe to the always interesting LifeHacker. It looks like this:
With the upcoming version you can press the couch icon at the bottom of the article or, even better, do a quick two finger tap and a moment later it looks like this:
It's a great feature and I love it. Coming soon.
I've always been a big fan of River of News. I'm glad to see it is in continued development. It is, hands down, my go-to Google Reader app for the iPad.
ReplyDeleteSmall wish ... I hope you will consider allowing the option of turning off Readability icon. As an Instapaper user, it serves no purpose for me. When using Reeder on the iPhone, the (non-removable) Readability icon just ends up being unnecessary UI clutter.
I thought the icon was unobtrusive enough and the feature important enough to warrant a permanent button. I'll reconsider.
DeleteFor those of who hate visual clutter there is a new feature to hide the unread counts in the feed list. So there's that.
Thank you very much! That is a nice surprise for Monday.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely looking forward to this release! Any ETA yet?
ReplyDeleteLove the new Readability feature! I use pocket but this will still help when reading full articles to not have to go to a full website view just to read a full article.
Here are a few wish list items (if you are still in development mode):
In settings, whatever primary offline reader you setup will have the small icon for reading (e.g. Readability, Pocket, Instapaper). It still might use Readbility's service to display the page but, the icon will correctly identify your choice.
When you tap on the icon, it displays the article. Tap and hold will save the article quickly (this will just be a shortcut of the arrow icon functionality but will save a few taps)
Automatic Scroll mode. Articles will automatically scroll without touching the screen for quick reading over the articles. Touching the screen stops the scrolling. Scrolling speed will be set in the settings.
Keep up the great work!
Interesting idea to show the offline reading service. The logos are trademarked so it's not entirely up to me what I can display regarding these other services.
DeleteThere is an alternative. You can configure a two or three finger tap to initiate any sharing service you want. Most people miss this feature because it's in the iPad system settings app where no one looks. Which is why the upcoming version also moves all preferences inside the app so they can be discovered easily. But you can do it with the version you have now.
A lot of people have asked for automatic scroll. I gotta say I don't get it but I'm obviously not understanding something because people want it.
That is a good tip about the two finger quick save. Looks like the settings definitely needs to move into the app. I think (in general) settings are forgotten about if they are in the apple ipad settings area. At least I usually forget about them being there.
ReplyDeleteI had another idea concerning the reader app. But, this would require a little more development time, etc. There are always times when I am reviewing through my google reader items that there are items that I want to download (a new app demo, etc.) I think it would be awesome to see a helper app that was built (for Mac and Windows) that when you tap on a download link in the River of News app, it then send the download link to the helper app and the helper app starts downloading it immediately and places the new download in your downloads folder.
I know this is probably well beyond the scope of this next release. But, just thought I would mention it to you since you are thinking about changes and modifications.
Thanks!
You're right, settings aren't noticed if they are in the system app. It was never a good idea from Apple and I shouldn't have done it. It could work if iOS provided a universal way to go from the app to the system prefs and back. Moving the prefs into the app isn't the sexy feature that I'm talking about for this release but it's probably the most important.
DeleteThat's a neat product idea you've got. It's way beyond the scope of River of News but I'm going to think about it. The world is missing some sort of product that is a universal internet bucket for all the stuff I come across each day. Their are read later services like Readability and Pocket, and bookmarking services like Diigo, note taking services like Evernote, but none of those do it for me. I actually use email and just put search terms in the message to myself that I can find again in GMail. There has to be a better way.
Will there be a way to turn the Readability function on by default on a feed by feed basis (e.g., only on partial RSS feeds like Lifehacker)? Another feed reader has this functionality already, so it would be great to have it in your app, as well.
ReplyDeleteThanks!
The Readability terms of service are that I must first show the original content before I show the stripped view. They also don't want bulk processing and will cut off access to API users who put too much load on them.
DeleteReadability has been kind enough to provide me with a non-public API that allows me to reformat the content inside of the app. I can't go against their wishes.
Also, River of News has unique constraints because of the infinite scrolling stream of articles. Other feed reading apps only show one article at a time and then require some sort of refreshing or paging to get to the next article. Therefore, they can make a new request for each article you view and only for the ones you view.
River of News appends them in one stream. Defaulting to the Readability view would require preprocessing every article to build the stream so you can scroll through it.
Thanks for taking the time to write and I understand why that would be desirable but there are limitations that prevent it.
I have a first generation iPad (with no real way to upgrade even though I really want to) and the app seems to be slow and crash a lot for me. Is there something you might have up your sleeve to help fix this? I know I need to get with the times of the new tech out there but finances suck...
ReplyDeleteThat's a good feature to include but I personally prefer the full website to the striped down readability view for many sites I subscribe too. I've been using NewsBlur on the iPhone which replaces partial text feeds (and other feeds as well) with a full website view. Could you also work on that as an additional option to the Readability feature?
ReplyDeleteThat's a great news!
ReplyDelete