I’ve been working on this app for reading Tech news from multiple sources in one place and having easy access to the comments of each one, its something I really wanted for me and didn’t find an app that would do it right.
I’d like to get some feedback before going much further on development, this is the very minimal version of what I want it to be.
Stuff that I plan to add:
- More sources (what other sources you know that would make sense to include?)
- Save for later (even though I can already save to pocket from the app, this would be nice to have)
- Configurable sources
- Allow hiding stories
- Detection and hiding of duplicates
- User accounts: allow to sync read, hidden and saved articles across platforms
Longform has a particularly attractive feature that restores your spot in a page when iOS terminates the app. Longform and Panda and Redef are all incredibly useful without customizing them.
Thanks for the tips, my idea is that, at least for tech news, I should be able to get enough stories from just one place, not having to go through multiple apps to get a grasp of whats going on out there... and maybe in a future include other categories and not just tech.
I also like the idea of pulling the stories from aggregators as its stuff that people is explicitly expressing interest for.
I'd like to be able to select & apply different comment sort methods globally. Maybe a drop-down that applies the user-rating at top like HN does, but for the other sites' comments, too, who don't do it that way themselves. Come to think of it, it might be fun to sort the main list based on the rating of the articles' submitters, as opposed to their being based on the individual articles' score on their origin site. Like ordering the main page like HN orders comments. ...Just an idea-
I really like the tone HN is using. Together with iOS's Night shift feature it creates even better colors to read on IMO, but on your current colors it has no effect at all.
How are the rankings for items from HN & Reddit weighted in the 'all' list? Surely this is hard to balance correctly?
When I made http://serializer.io I opted to list items that reached a certain threshold sequentially but I've wondered about how I might better present the vote information.
Well really I just keep the ranking order as in each source site and intercalate them, like one HN one Reddit, one Slashdot, all keeping the order of each front page.
I'm still thinking on what would be the optimal way to display them, but didn't heard of http://serializer.io is it basically the same concept? the only site I found doing a similar thing was http://reader.one/ but its IOS app is not so nice.
Ok gotcha; so order is an alternated list of the three sources. This is a good default but you might be able to do something fun here - perhaps ranking stories based on their vote count stdev from the mean score might give an interesting list.
serializer is just a web app and lists stories in a sequential feed - while it has HN, reddit & slashdot on there it's kind of a different concept. It's more of a 'reader'/feed that happens to combine various sources.
Cool! If you've currated the sources that could make it easier. You should take a look at feedly [ http://feedly.com/ ]. You could learn from their UX, and maybe improve upon it. I currently use them on my browser and my phone(android), and I enjoy the experience and control.
It's nice to have a single interface to access multiple sources, but when you click on the comments you are taken to the origin site's comment section. If you could comment directly from your webapp that would be a very useful.
The browser app and chrome extension let you click to go either to the comments or directly to the post. works for tons of sites like hacker news, lobsters etc.
Maybe its just me, but I find panda too complex to use, I just tried one more time now and could not get a simple combination of this 3 sources of news in one timeline, I wanted something simpler and that would work without configuration to get good tech news
my problem with almost every program is a lack of deduplication. really only techmeme and google news deduplicate stories well. i want ten places covering one story to show up only once, with ten links to the variants.
Exactly my thoughts!, Im just a little concerned on how to accurately determine when two different links are the same story, it would be very bad to join different stories into one by mistake
The German language appears to have a lot of good words for app names. In fact, a lot of times when I'm trying to come up with names for apps and such, I usually just head over to Google Translate and start translating mundane English words into other languages until I get one that sounds cool coming off my American-English tongue.
Lesen is the German verb meaning "to read". There was another submission recently about an immutable/persistent data structure library named Immer which means, roughly, "always".
Well yes :D I really like aggregators as for me great part of the experience is the community, reading the comments, so I wanted a place where I can do this for the different aggregators
A bit off topic here.
I'd like to appreciate how tiny, the payload for the site is. The main js, is just over 18 kb. Too small for a SPA. It loads quickly and reacts reasonably quickly. Good job on that.
Noticed that the analytics related js file alone, took over 11kb. We can do a better job at this.
Thanks :) Im proud at the minimalistic approach I took for this project, been working with react.js lately, I just wanted the simplest and fastest type of app here, and Phoenix seems to be responding pretty well too
42 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadI’d like to get some feedback before going much further on development, this is the very minimal version of what I want it to be.
Stuff that I plan to add:
- More sources (what other sources you know that would make sense to include?) - Save for later (even though I can already save to pocket from the app, this would be nice to have) - Configurable sources - Allow hiding stories - Detection and hiding of duplicates - User accounts: allow to sync read, hidden and saved articles across platforms
What else would you like seeing in this app? :)
I would add a "tweet" link, and a link to instapaper myself.
does your site have any sort of leaderboard http://www.memeorandum.com/lb
1) https://longform.org/ http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/longform/id490437064?mt=8
2) https://usepanda.com/ https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/panda-lite/id934805959?mt=8
3) https://redef.com/ app not in appstore
4) medium
5) feedly
Longform has a particularly attractive feature that restores your spot in a page when iOS terminates the app. Longform and Panda and Redef are all incredibly useful without customizing them.
If you are looking for sources check out Panda AND these lists https://redef.com/charts/sources/total http://www.aldaily.com/media http://scitechdaily.com/resources/ http://www.techmeme.com/lb http://www.mediagazer.com/lb http://www.memeorandum.com/lb https://longform.org/archive/publications https://longform.org/archive/writers
I prefer when "save for later" buttons are customizable, so you can set it to save to pocket, pinboard, feedly etc.
I also like the idea of pulling the stories from aggregators as its stuff that people is explicitly expressing interest for.
you could tell panda you just want hackernews and lobster and dribble.
if youre going to enter this space, these are the competitors you should try out.
it does sound a little bit like reinventing http://www.techmeme.com/river
(Quick preview of site, just like on safari)
I'd like to be able to select & apply different comment sort methods globally. Maybe a drop-down that applies the user-rating at top like HN does, but for the other sites' comments, too, who don't do it that way themselves. Come to think of it, it might be fun to sort the main list based on the rating of the articles' submitters, as opposed to their being based on the individual articles' score on their origin site. Like ordering the main page like HN orders comments. ...Just an idea-
When I made http://serializer.io I opted to list items that reached a certain threshold sequentially but I've wondered about how I might better present the vote information.
I'm still thinking on what would be the optimal way to display them, but didn't heard of http://serializer.io is it basically the same concept? the only site I found doing a similar thing was http://reader.one/ but its IOS app is not so nice.
serializer is just a web app and lists stories in a sequential feed - while it has HN, reddit & slashdot on there it's kind of a different concept. It's more of a 'reader'/feed that happens to combine various sources.
What about an Android version (many of us don't have iOS, especially techies in South Korea)?
I guess the RSS feed will do.
Good luck!
https://usepanda.com/
The browser app and chrome extension let you click to go either to the comments or directly to the post. works for tons of sites like hacker news, lobsters etc.
Lesen is the German verb meaning "to read". There was another submission recently about an immutable/persistent data structure library named Immer which means, roughly, "always".
I'd like to 'favorite' this comment, but don't see a link with which to do so. :-(
Could anyone advise on how?
Noticed that the analytics related js file alone, took over 11kb. We can do a better job at this.