Hacker News Reader

Comment by electic | Hacker News Reader

I tried out NewsBlur and sadly, Feedly seems leagues better.

Could you atleast describe what is better about Feedly, so not only the creator of NewsBlur, but also anyone looking to spend money on an RSS Solution gets your informed input?

I briefly tried both.

* Feedly has a simple interface which is much more like Google Reader. But it depends on a plugin (or an app) rather than being an allwhere accessible website. Their Kindle Fire app seemed to load content extremely slowly, and its interface wasn't a simple list. And it's free, so I can't be a customer and I don't know how they earn money.

* NewsBlur is complicated and unresponsive. There are a lot of inscrutable unlabeled icons, and I don't understand why an arrow follows the mouse. It's a paid service - I can be a customer - but I don't know how sustainable NewsBlur will be with its current issues and with subscription as its only source of funding.

If NewsBlur seems solid by May, I'll gladly pay them. If Feedly seems less like a faceless data-miner by May, I'll use them.

"and I don't understand why an arrow follows the mouse."

Really? It is a feature for better reading, so you can can easily see which line you are.

Make sense now that someone points it out! For those who mouse click to mark reading point.

Aha. It somehow hadn't occurred to me to click on that triangle. I'm still not sure it's a useful-to-me feature, but it at least makes a little more sense now. It's less annoying once locked down, anyway. Maybe it should default to being locked down somewhere and only unlock the first time you click on it, rather than default to floating around freely.

You mean so as to remember where you were last reading are on the page? But if you use the mouse to switch browser tabs, that arrow moves up to the top of the page, and if you use any of the controls at the bottom, it moves down. I guess one could very carefully leave the window at a specific place so as to preserve that arrow's position, but it's not an obvious thing to do. How are you using this feature that makes it an improvement over just letting your pointer itself mark the current reading position?

Try http://rssident.com

I am working on making the UI more user friendly and adding OPML import/export.

It's going to be supported by advertising with a subscription service for premium features and no ads.

I like the predictive aspect Personally, I'm looking for something with a GR atom API, possibly to even run the existing GR frontend against, not a new UI with a different focus (I would prefer one focusing on curation and workflow over social or sharing).

I was attracted by the basic looking design, but I can't work out how to do anything. Why am I subscribed to a huge number of random feeds? How do I get rid of them? How do I view the content of the feed instead of opening a new window on the original site?

If you haven't added any feeds to your favorites then viewing 'My Favorites' shows all feeds by default.

Still working on the UI to show the article content and links to attached files.

I love NewsBlur but I found it a bit busy in the UI. It seemed like a lot for what it really needed to do. That being said, Feedly's minimalistic UI was far better. However, Feedly is a bit slower when there are tons of stories on the screen.

Overall I found Feedly to be better.

I looked at Feedly and Newsblur last week as I look for my eventual Google Reader replacement.

Feedly turned me off because it has no open web implementation, it runs through the Chrome web store. Aside from some developer related plugins I refuse to use a completely superfluous wrapper around a website if I am on my PC.

I've tried Newsblur but it's just so "busy" (I know where my mouse is on the vertical axis thank you very much). I may warm to it, but I'll probably end up with something a little simpler. But I wish all the success in the world to conesus, a variety of small, customer focused, customer capitalized independent web service vendors is a good thing for all of us.

You should lock that "dorito" that follows your mouse. It allows you to adjust the currently selected story. It's an indicator line. Maybe I should lock it by default and allow you to click on it to have it follow your mouse...

I wasn't aware you could do this. Locking it by default seems like it would make more sense.

Also while I've got you, two issues I've noticed.

1. When I click "All Stories" to refresh my feeds it defaults to listing everything, even though I have it set so I only view one item at a time. As soon as I click the button/arrow to go to the next unread item it shows the first item as it should and everything works fine after that.

2. I seem to run out of items after I've viewed ~20ish and I have to click "All Stories" again to fetch a new bunch

I'm using the dev site if that matters (Issues happen on both sites though). So far these are the only things annoying me and otherwise newsblur is pretty good.

1. Intentional. Otherwise you'd stare at a blank screen until you click a story.

2. That's an unfortunate bug, but one that will probably get sussed out when I work on scaling over the next month.

Dev is largely just a re-skin. They share a backend.

Why can't there be an option in the cast of 1. for it to automatically open the first unread story when I click "All stories"? Basically what I am doing by pressing the first unread button.

I can understand not doing that by default since people may want to see their unread feeds, but I always just go to the first unread one anyway.

In that case, there's a preference waiting for you that you're going to just love...

Haha, excellent, thank you for helping me. Also "Text" view seems to be missing from the Default View preferences, is this intentional?

up / down arrows to go to next story sucks too, fwiw.

> Feedly turned me off because it has no open web implementation, it runs through the Chrome web store

Seriously, going to the feedly website, the first thing you're confronted with is a list of platform-specific apps you have to download, and "this website wants to install something, ok?"

There seems little reason for this with today's browsers, and it seems like a very good way to make a large proportion of potential users say "no thanks" before even trying it. I know it made me immediately toss feedly into the discard pile in my reader-replacement search...

Try http://rssident.com

The UI needs work but it is very simple.

Scalability will not be an issue. It was designed from the start to be scalable. Just add servers.

Got it the first time you posted on this story ;)

I tried both and NewsBlur seems leagues better. It guess it depends on what you want.

For me the interface of NewsBlur is so much better for getting through tons of feeds,

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