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River of News RSS Reader is now available

Try out the video in iOS 4.2.1 and see what changed. I haven't had a chance to install the final release yet. The betas traded the old video playback problems for new ones.


As for Arc90's Readability, I had planned to implement that instead of Instapaper but there are technical difficulties. Readability is client side reformatting and requires the entire page to be loaded before it can work. The bookmarklet expects that you manually click it after the page is loaded. I had a prototype working in River of News that was automated but it wasn't a very good experience. You'd see the page load in it's normal form and then would reformat itself. This could be a significant delay over 3g. That also meant it still downloaded the ads even if the final formatting discarded them.
 
I'll take a look at Radbox.

Thank you csnpit and thank you to those who have recommended River of News in other threads here. (The rules are that I can't comment in those threads.) Word of mouth is the only marketing I have so it means everything to me that you tell other people.
 
I've put River of News on sale for $1.99 (or international equivalent) to celebrate it's return to the news top 10.
 
What's the future possibility of being able to enlarge pics and copy text from the main area?
 
Enlarging pics is on the list of things I want to add.

Copying text from the main article view is tricky only because it interferes with the app's recognition of the double tap gesture. I'll revisit that and see if there is a solution but it might have to be one or the other.
 
how long will this be on sale for? I am planning on getting ipad 2, and hope this sales doesnt go away when I get it.
 
This is a price experiment and I'm not sure if I'll leave it up through the launch of the iPad 2. But you can buy it now using iTunes on your computer. Apple will know you've already bought it and won't charge to download it on the device or it will transfer when you sync.
 
Here is what I need. Get up in the morning and get my feeds. Pick the 10 - 20 articles that seem interesting and be able to download the full article since I won't have a connection. Get on the bus and read the full article. If you can do this, let me know. Also, I want to put in my own feeds, not use googlereader.

Thanks.
 
PCClone said:
Here is what I need. Get up in the morning and get my feeds. Pick the 10 - 20 articles that seem interesting and be able to download the full article since I won't have a connection. Get on the bus and read the full article. If you can do this, let me know. Also, I want to put in my own feeds, not use googlereader.
Click to expand...

River of News combined with Instapaper or Read It Later will cover your usage scenario very well. In River of News you can configure a two finger tap to send the article to your sharing service of choice. So you can quickly scroll through articles and when you see one that is interesting you have a one step way to send it to an offline reading service. No digging through menus or having new windows pop up. The source URL is sent to the sharing service so this works for feeds with truncated articles.

However, River of News does require Google Reader. There is so much benefit to Google Reader. It's so great to be able to access your subscription list and up to date read articles from any device with a web browser and from so many apps.
 
DylanG said:
River of News combined with Instapaper or Read It Later will cover your usage scenario very well. In River of News you can configure a two finger tap to send the article to your sharing service of choice. So you can quickly scroll through articles and when you see one that is interesting you have a one step way to send it to an offline reading service. No digging through menus or having new windows pop up. The source URL is sent to the sharing service so this works for feeds with truncated articles.

However, River of News does require Google Reader. There is so much benefit to Google Reader. It's so great to be able to access your subscription list and up to date read articles from any device with a web browser and from so many apps.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the response. I will be buying this app tonight.
 
Hi Dylan,

I just downloaded and installed River, I've been using Reeder before.


So far the good:

+ great concept

+ easy to use

+ setup was a breeze

+ Easy integration with facebook and Read It Later


The bad:

- horizontal swipes do not work very well, actually they s*ck royally, about 8 out 10 attempts to wipe horizontally will fail. And this defeats the whole purpose of the reader.

- no fullscreen mode in landscape: This totally annoying, when reading a feed, I just want to the see the fee. Nothing else, no obnoxious navigation bar.

- in Reeder I can send a link to Read it Later, so I can read a blog, and have look a the contents of the links later on in RiL, I miss that feature on River.


...and if I had to rate your app now, I would give it 2 or 3 stars. It deserves a full 5 stars. Fullscreen, working swipe, these ar basics. The ability to send links to RiL same. Hope these this improvemenst soon.

River has the potential of becoming a great product, but it is not yet there.
 
Last edited:
You are the first person to complain about the horizontal swiping. Can you elaborate? I'm using standard iOS paging (like the home screen) for the swiping. I've never seen it perform in any way but what would be expected.

Your Read It Later comments puzzle me because you both praise the integration and then complain that it's missing. River of News has Read It Later sharing from both the feed and web browser views. I don't understand what is missing.

Full-screen feed viewing in landscape is an interesting discussion. It was an intentional decision not to offer it. I'll explain my reasons and then I'm interested in hearing feedback from my customers.

  1. The split view UI is an Apple standard. In landscape, there is a list of items on the left and the content is on the right. In portrait, the content is full-screen and the list is exposed with a popover. I put a lot of effort in customizing the visual design but decided to mostly stick with Apple's standards in terms of user interaction. Apple is really good at UI design. People are used to the standard iOS UI models. I feel there has to be a really strong reason to go against what Apple has designed and people are comfortable with.
  2. I don't see that compelling reason to have a full-screen landscape feed view. You can rotate the iPad to portrait and get a clutter free, full-screen reading interface that is better in every way to how it would be in landscape. Even if landscape was full-screen, the article width would be the same (or close to it). It's not comfortable to read text with excessive line lengths. This is why the ebook readers switch to a two column mode in landscape and wide format printed text is broken up into columns. A multi-column view doesn't make sense for the article feed so a landscape view would just be the same column width with lots of empty space on the sides. So why not just turn it to portrait where the screen real estate is used to display more article length?
  3. It would require more UI elements and more complexity to provide a way to make the content full-screen in landscape. There would need to be another button or a dragging bar if users are going to discover the feature. It could be entirely gesture based but then there is no way for anyone to know it exists. Simplicity and lack of clutter were first order design goals and are often cited by users as something they appreciate. I have to feel it benefits a substantial portion of my users in a substantial way for me to add another UI element. I don't see that benefit here. These are the toughest choices I have to make as an app designer. The easy choice is to keep adding features to satisfy every request in my chase for another sale. I love adding features! But I believe the best software, and particularly mobile, is achieved with restraint. I'm inspired by Apple and I'm constantly asking myself if my design decisions are the ones they would make.
 
DylanG said:
Your Read It Later comments puzzle me because you both praise the integration and then complain that it's missing. River of News has Read It Later sharing from both the feed and web browser views. I don't understand what is missing.
Click to expand...

I think what he means is that he'd like to be able to tap and hold a link from an article in River of News and be able to send that link to RIL; he doesn't want to send the article/blog post URL, which River of News can do already.
 
River of News is on sale this weekend for all of you new iPad 2 owners. Get it while the gettin is hot!
 
It should be $2.99 now. Sometimes the App Store can be slow to update.
 
Thanks for the sale price, I've just picked it up! I'm probably being slow but how do you mark posts as read when mark as read while scrolling is off? I guess that the automatic mark as read is probably how River of News is meant to be used but I'm not quite ready to make that step yet.
 
blackNBUK said:
Thanks for the sale price, I've just picked it up! I'm probably being slow but how do you mark posts as read when mark as read while scrolling is off? I guess that the automatic mark as read is probably how River of News is meant to be used but I'm not quite ready to make that step yet.
Click to expand...

No, you aren't being slow. A lot of people are confused by this. The lock icon at the bottom of each article toggles keep unread/mark as read.

I need to rethink this. There are 3 states that need to be represented:

Unread
Read
Keep unread

I should break these out into 2 icons. One that toggles read/unread and one that toggles keep unread. A check mark is the obvious choice to me for read/unread but, unfortunately, Google uses the check mark for keep unread on the Reader site and I fear that it would be confusing. I'm militant about not adding more buttons but I've come around to believing this one is needed.
 
DylanG said:
No, you aren't being slow. A lot of people are confused by this. The lock icon at the bottom of each article toggles keep unread/mark as read.

I need to rethink this. There are 3 states that need to be represented:

Unread
Read
Keep unread

I should break these out into 2 icons. One that toggles read/unread and one that toggles keep unread. A check mark is the obvious choice to me for read/unread but, unfortunately, Google uses the check mark for keep unread on the Reader site and I fear that it would be confusing. I'm militant about not adding more buttons but I've come around to believing this one is needed.
Click to expand...

Good to know that I wasn't missing something obvious :)

I'm not sure that two buttons are necessary. My suggestion would be to keep the existing button but give it three states instead of two.

- Starting in
State 1: Post unread
- Tap on icon (or scroll past when that's turned on) takes you to
State 2: Post read
- Tap on icon takes you to
State 3: Keep unread
- Tap on icon takes you back to state 2.

Which images you use for the states is a bit of a tricky problem. The convention I've seen in other RSS readers is to use a filled circle for unread, an unfilled circle for read and a filled circle in a different colour for keep unread. I don't think those choices are particularly obvious but I did get used to them and I suppose they have the advantage that people may have seen them before.
 
Having played with the software a bit, I do like it. I do have a couple of queries/suggestions.

First, some of the news feeds I subscribe to only include tiny snippets of text - e.g. The first sentence of a news article. An option to fetch the text might be nice, but I guess you'd need to reformat the article for display? Not easy to strip off all the unwanted navigational elements on a webpage... but doable for the niche of an RSS reader for web comics.

Second, for some comics feeds in particular, I'd like to see the image larger by default. The dark grey background margins outside each feed article seem to waste too much space, especially in portrait mode where I'd halve them, or more. A little more space might be saved in the inner margin as well, but it is important to keep enough for the aesthetics.

Related to this, if I click on a link it opens in a popup window which is full screen in portrait mode (great), but very narrow on landscape mode. Please use full screen here too.
 
pjac said:
Related to this, if I click on a link it opens in a popup window which is full screen in portrait mode (great), but very narrow on landscape mode. Please use full screen here too.
Click to expand...
This is what flip book does, and probably other apps too.
 
pjac said:
This is what flip book does, and probably other apps too.
Click to expand...

This is actually an option in the settings (located in Apple's setting section) that the developer added for those that wanted full screen browsing in landscape. This is still my favorite RSS reader!
 
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