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River of News RSS Reader is now available

Beau10 said:
Hmm... So I see you can deactivate the confirmation on the mark all as read.. Apologies to the developer, criticism on that point rescinded. :) But the issue of marking things as read as you scroll still is there, is there something I'm missing? I'll scroll through a whole feed and not see the count change.
Click to expand...

Tap the gear icon up top to access the feed settings where you can turn this on. I really need to add a help graphic to guide people to the features.

p-settings.jpg
 
Hey Dylan,

I just edited my message as you responded. This is awesome.

That said, you're clearly trying to cater to my type. Sometimes we just lazily assume things - when we see something that at first blush speaks to us, that it just works that way out of the box, getting out of the way and all. So I agree a help graphic would be welcome, but maybe even changing the defaults?

At this point my only criticism is speed. I know future updates will make things better. I really love what you've done though. For now I'll toggle between this and Reeder, and once it's blazing fast probably ditch Reeder.
 
Beau10 said:
That said, since the prime motive of this reader to essentially get out of the way, maybe the defaults for these should be flipped? There might be a few people that are irate at this, but I think this suits the main demographic. Just a suggestion.
Click to expand...

Everyone has told me that and I've been stubborn. It's because marking as read is kind of a destructive action like deleting. I don't want someone to get in the app and start flinging away scrolling and not understand why all of their articles disappeared. But even I forget to turn it on every time I delete and reinstall the app for testing.
 
DylanG said:
Everyone has told me that and I've been stubborn. It's because marking as read is kind of a destructive action like deleting. I don't want someone to get in the app and start flinging away scrolling and not understand why all of their articles disappeared. But even I forget to turn it on every time I delete and reinstall the app for testing.
Click to expand...

I understand the desire to not piss people off. But consider you're essentially catering to a certain demographic that shares your philosophy, so the people who would be irate would be the minority, and those you are speaking too, it would elicit that "wow" experience out of the box. Also consider Google Reader does this and has done this for years (at least as a long time Goog reader user I'm not aware of a way to change this behavior?), so it's not unexpectedly destructive.
 
It's been a fun weekend! I peaked at #3 in the News category and #87 overall. I'm thrilled by the response to the app. It's very rewarding.

I'm listening to everything being asked. The most common requests fall into two categories.

1. Add the Google actions for Keep Unread, Share and Like. I'm trying to come up with a way to add these that doesn't distract too much.

2. I'm going to broadly categorize this one as a desire for a faster way to scan article headers. People say it in a lot of different ways but I think that's what it boils down to. I know that's not a usage model supported especially well by the app today. There are faster ways to scan high volume feeds that are mostly junk. I concede that to the other 20 RSS apps that are based around lists of headers.

But is there a way I can satisfy this while staying true to the concept of River of News? I think so. I have two ideas.

Show an overlay with the article title that fades in only when you are scrolling quickly. Sometimes it's hard to scroll fast because you go faster then iOS can tile in the content. (This rendering delay is wildly inconsistent and out of my control, unfortunately.) An overlay would allow you to know what's scrolling by without having to stop and wait for it to render.

The other addition would be a gesture that does a fast scroll to the next article. Let's say it was a two finger tap. Then you could stare at the same spot on the screen and just tap, tap, tap to scan the headers. During development I experimented with buttons that did this. I pulled the feature because I didn't like the buttons. They added clutter and buttons are never in the right spot for everyone. I think a gesture is a better way to do it. But what gesture? Two finger tap? Two finger swipe? Suppose you scroll with a thumb? Double tap? (Double tap kind of sucks)

So there's some insight into what I'm planning to add and I'd love suggestions. I bet someone out there has the killer idea I haven't thought of.
 
Hi Dylan, I tweeted you about doing a two finger swipe to skip to the next article.

I didn't really think of it to fix the high volume feeds issue, I've had a few articles (notably a "here's 50 pictures of birds for wallpaper" one) that were painful to get to the end of using the current implementation. In that instance, it would have been very natural to perform a two finger swipe to jump to the end of the article.

One idea I had was maybe to do the scissors pinch gesture (or a double tap or maybe more) to collapse a feed into _just_ the title, ie no body content at all. Then you could very quickly skim through a large volume of headers without having to "suffer" the content.

I strongly feel that gestures haven't been embraced properly on the iPad yet. You've got so much more room to interact with the thing, that multiple finger gestures feel very natural.

I love the approach though. I'm using RoN in preference to Reeder at the moment despite the first release niggles (pop in and performance have been a bit bad, but I appreciate there's perhaps not so much you can do about that).

I'd love to help out with beta testing if you need it. I subscribe to quite a lot of feeds, so I'd probably be a good "high volume" tester :)
 
moviedan said:
One idea I had was maybe to do the scissors pinch gesture (or a double tap or maybe more) to collapse a feed into _just_ the title, ie no body content at all. Then you could very quickly skim through a large volume of headers without having to "suffer" the content.
Click to expand...

+1

I think this would be a great way to hit the masses while keeping the integrity of the app. I would vote on the pinch gesture.

Another good location for the pinch gesture would be on the folders side in landscape. A quick pinch in/out to collapse/open all of the folders.

My picky, stupid request: change the "settings" and "Mark all as read" icons. They look a bit cumbersome compared to the rest of the app. Sorry, I know that is a ridiculous request...
 
I "think" (but probably can't prove it) that most apps allow you to hold down a tap to avoid opening a link you encounter by accident. It this one, there is no stopping if I touch a picture or a headline while scrolling though a list of posts. If there is an alternate way to deal with this, I'd be interested in seeing it incorporated.
 
DylanG said:
Everyone has told me that and I've been stubborn. It's because marking as read is kind of a destructive action like deleting. I don't want someone to get in the app and start flinging away scrolling and not understand why all of their articles disappeared. But even I forget to turn it on every time I delete and reinstall the app for testing.
Click to expand...

Perhaps a pop-up dialog the first time the app is installed and opened that asks the user what behavior they'd prefer?
 
Just a quick note,

I was watching MacBreak Weekly (Ep 209) today and Leo Laporte's pick of the week happens to be River of News!

Pretty big endorsement. Congrats.
 
The pinch idea is great! I'll see how well I can make that work.

The MacBreak podcast review has sent River of News climbing up the charts today. I was busy all day and it was quite a surprise to check my rank this evening and be in the top 50.

It's about the 1:25:00 mark
http://twit.tv/mbw209
 
I made the purchase after MacBreak's short demo and I'm happy I did. It's a great App and wish there was an iPhone version also. Food 4 thought?

Others have already pointed out some great ideas for future additions so I won't add to the list. I'm a big Reeder fan for many reasons but RoN is splitting my time and could take me away from Reeder.

Great job with this App :) hope to see an iPhone version. I love seamless Apps it just seems that much better when you can use either device and see the App you like on both.
 
Ive since shelved this app for Reeder and NewsRack as I found that waiting for the feeds when scrolling to be most irritating. So till there is a fix for that, it will stay on the iPad but wont be used.
 
Could it be that a lot of RSS feeds in google lead to crashing of this app? I didn't get past the launch screen with the "Select a feed" box. Nothing else is shown......
 
Please download the latest version from the app store if you experience crashing. I'm sorry about that. It took Apple 5 days to approve it.
 
Love the app.

The interruptions when scrolling & loading new articles is annoying. If anything could be done to fix this it would be a big deal, as this is the one thing that would cause me to go back to other readers.

Some feature suggestions:
- Definitely make the "send to" link clearer, I didn't realise it was there until I read this thread.
- It would be nice if in settings we could set a default email to address & subject prefix

Other than that it's pretty much perfect as far as I'm concerned!
 
Development has begun on some of the features mentioned in this thread. I'd like some fresh blood on my beta team. If you've sent me a PM already then I've got you on the list. If you haven't and you'd like to beta test please send me a PM with your email address.

When development is active I push out releases to the beta team every few days and sometimes every day. Often times you get half baked features though I try to be conscious of always giving you something that works, even if it might be rough around the edges. To install the beta builds you have to sync with iTunes on your computer so I ask that this be a process you can do regularly.

Thanks for your interest.
 
Just brought river of dreams.

I was using & happy with Pulse & Reeder combo but thought I'll go ahead and buy ANOTHER app :eek:

First impressions are positive..... but ...... It's also different to them (obviously?). I'll use it over the weekend And see how I go.

Is this a 'bug'? In the services menu at the bottom I turned off all but delicious & Instapaper but when I press the button I get only the delicious option and the "more" option - surely with only two services ON i shouldn't need to have to select more to get to Instapaper ..... Fix?

And secondly the font is good but would it be possible to include an extra small font?

As others have said - pls add offline viewing.

Edit - the services all show up now.... Strange, maybe it needed a restart.
 
Just saw that it made the new and noteworthy section in the App Store

Congratulations


Made Gizmodo as well
 
Update : I like it

But it doesnt show 'open in safari' in the actions/service menu - it seems unnecessary to have to go to another "more" open up screen to access the actions..... can/is this going to be improved?

Update : worked out you need to use the service for it to then show all the time....
 
Great app

Let me say first that I love this app and Reeder has been deleted from my iPad. Just two very minor "bugs" I've encountered. the folders tabs are kind of finicky. Very hard to get it to expand the folder versus selecting the folder sometimes. The second is that the name of the first feed under each folder section is usually chopped off, only has the first letter, or doesn't have any name at all. These are both minor bugs and don't preclude me from using the app at all. Just wanted the dev to know about them. Fantastic app!!!

Usually I post on toucharcade, but I look forward to posting here as well now!
 
Very nice app. I was using Reeder primarily but this has just taken it's place. They're both different (where Reeder just gives you the summary) but they both have very nice design elements to them. River of News I feel goes one step further and it's been great to use so far. Excellent work!
 
First, let me make it clear that I really like this app. I don't even mind the lag that sometimes occurs when scrolling, since Google Reader does this too.

But a couple of things. First, a bug: once in a while the last article in a folder stops scrolling before I've reached the end, so i miss the last part of the text, and can't get to the icon to save to Instapaper. This only happens rarely, and I don't know how to reproduce it.

Second, for my taste, the headlines are too big compared to the text. For instance, using the 'modern' font, 'small' seems plenty big for the article text, but the headline seems huge.

And a question - is there a way to force a refresh to update the unread counts? I didn't see one..
 
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