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Show HN: Telescope, a news reader app

90 points by meteor333 ↗ HN
I got fed up with the news reader apps out there so I decided to make my own. Its a simple concept where it tracks all your favorite news sources for new posts and the social shares it received. Then it ranks it HN/Reddit style using social shares as upvotes. It's not meant to be alternative to HN, just a focused way to track your favorite sources. Please try it out and let me know what do you think,

http://telescope.surf/

Note: you can do 'Add to Homescreen' on mobile to make it as an app.

Please leave a feedback or any feature wishlist you may have.

Thanks!

80 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] thread
nsriv
I love this! Desktop view could use more page width, but I love the concept. Adding in custom RSS URLs as sources could be a good direction to take as well.
meteor333
thanks a lot! you made my day! Feel free to add any wishlist through the comment bubble of the app. I'll try to be quick for new features.

Will work on screen size and RSS soon.

drvortex
Nice, but really, it is a narrow column on a 4K screen. Can you make it adapt to screen sizes so that it can use at least 80% of the screen?
meteor333
I did some fixes to improve that experience. Let me know what do you think
yodon
Two news sources that I'd like to see added are memeorandum.com (the best algorithmicly generated news feed I've found) and drudgereport.com (whose politics I disagree with but it's a hugely influential site and I try to avoid trapping myself in a bubble).

I haven't found a news reader type app that handles those two sites, so I find myself wasting huge amounts of time hitting those two pages and trying to skim their entire link list looking for the couple new articles since the last time I visited, guessing wrong, and re-opening articles I've already read twice before. I'd love to be able to use your site to newsreader those two.

(Memorandum is tricky, as it groups related articles together because so many news articles feed from the same source report, and that greatly reduces needlessly redundant reading. Even if you could only easily add drudge, that would be a huge time savings for folks like me)

meteor333
Looks like both are news aggregators themselves. It kind of makes it tricky. Let me look into it.
aaronhoffman
realclearpolitics.com would be another good source.

re: these being difficult because they are aggregators, could you just scrape the sites to find what they are linking to, then perform the same "social share is rank" logic to them?

newswhip.com is a site that does something similar, but it's very expensive. I would love an alternative!

I read many different sources, but I'm always curious what the "average" person is reading. What was the most shared/read article yesterday/last week, etc.

meteor333
So currently it does fetch most of the sources aggregated there such as NYT, Washington Post and Im working on adding more, but doing one more hop with another news aggregator sounds less efficient.
aaronhoffman
Those aggregators linking to the article could be counted as a "super vote"
adamrezich
Before I scroll down, every story on the page is similar perspectives on the same event (Trump at the UN), and the top story is posted by Shareblue. Maybe this is a fluke, but it's a terrible first impression for me as a user, and I won't be checking it again anytime soon.
meteor333
Sorry about that. Thats what is trending at this point. Im looking into ways to group similar news to avoid these echos
adamrezich
Ah, I was talking about memeorandum.com, not your site. Sorry for the confusion!
yodon
Correct, memorandum is designed for an audience that is sufficiently familiar with the reporting process that it understands and values that presentation.
5_minutes
It's nice, good work there. Have any plans to open source it or sell it as a script?
meteor333
Thank you! I don't have concrete plans yet about this, but if i decide to do open source, I'll follow up.
ghostbrainalpha
Very nice!

Any idea why the image from the NYT article "United Nations General Assembly Convenes in New York" is so low quality?

meteor333
Unfortunately the feed im working off of has that low quality image. I need find a better way.
jszymborski
From what I understand, most commercial media outlets provide low-res images in their RSS feeds, as they're suppose to serve as nothing more than a thumbnail that links to the site proper.

There are usually reems of ToS about this kinda syndication on the websites like the NYT.

webwanderings
How are you going to sustain this? It is fairly fast and slick (I am a daily RSS reader who follow hundred of sources).
meteor333
Thank you! Im definitely going to offer monthly subscription plan so I can sustain it. Im okay to have just 10 regular users to keep it going since I want to keep it live just for my sake as well :)

Would you pay for it? how much do you think?

amrrs
So it's PWA? So you must be able to send Push Notifications to Android devices? I'd be happy about it.

Ability to swipe out cards?

Nevertheless, A very clean minimalistic design choice.

cdurth
not bad!

but for sanity on desktop

#feed { overflow-y:hidden }

alexland
Any plans for the ability to add custom sources? I'm assuming that's not a trivial thing to add, but definitely something I'd be interested in.
meteor333
Definitely. Thats the next important thing im working on. Stay tuned!
fireworks10
Awesome. Curious, what are you using to scrape sources, and for social counts?
Toast_
Not OP, but I'm doing something similar with huginn [0]; I use it to scrape deals and sent POST requests to an Azure ml web service, which is output as RSS.

[0]: https://github.com/huginn/huginn

usuallymatt
I really like this! The only comment I'd make is to make the sidebar static so it stays there when you scroll down. Would be nice to switch topics quickly after I'm done skimming through headlines of another topic. Other than that I love it.
superbeef150
On that note, if the top bar is going to remain static, it might be worth putting some functionality in it on the desktop view so it's not just taking up screen space.

Not to sound nit-picky, but it seems easier to justify if it serves a purpose other than branding.

neilellis
When you get chance please wrap it is a desktop app, it's the sort of app I'd keep running like Tweetbot.

Oh and well done!

A competitor to Google News is great. The main problem I have with Google News is that it is always a few steps behind Twitter. It's really good if you're out of the loop, but behind the times if you're tracking a new story.

oddlyaromatic
Does Nativefier help you? https://github.com/jiahaog/Nativefier
volkk
First time seeing this. What a cool tool
mrmondo
I personally think that’s helping the problem of the infestation of poor performing JavaScript sites making their way onto the desktop, often they’re so bad it’s more sensible to open those sites in a Firefox / Safari window.
oddlyaromatic
I guess it comes down to what the user prioritizes, but I think it's good to have the option of running something on the desktop if I feel like it.
mrmondo
But that’s no different to running it in Firefox or whatever, it’s not a desktop app - it’s just JavaScript wrapper that is essentially doing the same thing but giving you less control and generally higher memory usage.
oddlyaromatic
Sure. It's like driving to to the gym to run on a treadmill. But I'm not sure that other people doing something for themselves for their own reasons needs to be corrected because you or I would find it suboptimal for ourselves. If the person wants the thing, let them do the thing. What are we, the thing police?
mosselman
Firefox does not have the WhatsApp logo, I cannot close and reopen a browser tab as easily as I can the nativefied app, etc. Of course it is different.
meteor333
Super helpful. This will help me ship it sooner rather than thinking electron or something.
oddlyaromatic
I'd love to know how it goes, I haven't actually tried it yet. Not sure how one would go about "releasing" the exported file.
ekbais
> Then it ranks it HN/Reddit style using social shares as upvotes.

Where do you get the social shares? I don't see any share buttons on the webpage?

notamy
I would assume it means it takes the share buttons from the articles themselves and considers those the "upvotes."
meteor333
Im fetching it from FB, Linkedin and Reddit
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ComputerGuru
That’s not news. Content that’s popular on Reddit is not news that’s important, it’s just the modern equivalent of pop culture (which may or may not encompass actual news).
jszymborski
Are there any copyright issues with you showing the full article content?

I understand that the headlines, images and blurbs are from public RSS feeds, but I'm almost certain the article content doesn't, not at least for many of these.

oblib
I wondered about that too when I clicked on few WaPo article.

I've never paid for a subscription there but I do think they put out some quality journalism and I still get to catch a bit of their stuff with the Apple News app on my phone but I know Apple has cut a deal with them.

I was about to bookmark this but I won't use an app to bypass their paywall. I have to respect that and it'd be pretty hard to not if I loaded this every morning with the rest of my news sites.

But I do like the work they've done on it. It's very nice.

CBpbxEcmecmBeH
I am using the message app now, just wrote about invalid URL

[edit] I love this new app

vicmanster
You need to make it so we can add our own news sources
mxuribe
I have been using Twitter lists, and simply adding the "breaking news" twitter accounts for a number of news sources...and this seems similar to that...however, I like this better! Great job! The only thing i would suggest is as others have noted: you might want to enable the feature for adding custom sources. Cheers!
kodfodrasz
So nowadays app means a website.
pvdebbe
It's a web app if it works on the WWW and requires JS to work. Otherwise it's a website. That is how I classify them anyway.
kodfodrasz
So an electron based JS client for a cloud service Accessed over the WWW is a web app (not a simple app. although I'd prefer if those were also not referred to as apps)?

But a JS heavy website is an app.

Xeoncross
Over 50% of the posts are Trump. I would really like to see someone make an app that focuses on filtering through the click-bait articles we're fed to actually break news into important events and subjects.

I guess I don't consider "most shares" a good way to rank. Bush, Obama, then Trump always are at the top unless some other celebrity does something big.

Looks really nice, good job!

meteor333
Thank you. Unfortunately, thats what is trending currently. I get your point though. Im thinking of adding an ability to filter by keyword or category. Also I want to explore if I can group the same news to avoid echos, such as iphone X launch or something.
rebuilder
How would the feed look if you filtered, say,the most shared top 10%?

Edit: Filtered out, I meant to say.

meteor333
I tried, but it doesnt fix the fundamental problem
avenius
I've been gathering stories from a collection of prominent news sites for about a year, and apparently the media just loves writing about Trump. It's consistently been the most prominent keyword (in number / ratio of occurrances). So that's not necessarily the author's fault.
[dead] nodomain
Nice. But launching a new service in 2017 without forced HTTPS or even HTTPS support is a no go. Please set this up. Letsencrypt does not cost a dollar.
meteor333
I dont have any user logins at this point. I'll https once that is supported
scottjad
Very nice. Two features I would like are tabs next to the "Today" tab that say "Yesterday" or maybe "48 Hours" and another that says "This week" or "Last week."

I often miss the news for a day (too busy) or a week (traveling/camping) and then want to catch up. Also sometimes I avoid the news for a day because I'm avoiding a sporting event spoiler. Most websites/newspapers are geared toward today and don't let you easily see what they looked like yesterday or a week ago. Even better would be allowing a time range and being able to see the top news during that time period.

Some basic filtering would be nice too. For example, I might want to see a politics-free feed, but right now that would require looking at three different categories. It would be nice if each category had a checkbox next to it, and clicking on the label selected the category and clicking on the checkbox deactivated it when no category is selected. Also it would be nice to be able to add search strings that would remove items, so I could add "Trump" to a list and not see any articles with that in the headline (or maybe in the summary). As it is now under Business I'd still get a lot of Trump-related news.

Also curious why you chose to have some feeds off by default.

meteor333
Yes im going to add time filtering soon as well.

I agree, Im exploring how I can allow filter by category or keyword without degrading the performance of the app.

>Also curious why you chose to have some feeds off by default. I just wanted to not auto-subscribe everyone to the new sources im adding.

robot
looks great. I would reduce the blank space from left and right on mobile. Use links when you go to article. it is more natural.
dieg0
Today, after the Mexico city earthquake, there where 50 buildings collapsed, probably hundreds of people dead, and a volcano erupting... but your "news" site doesn't show any of it... sorry but your site is a miss
osrec
The story is covered in the new section, about 8 items down when I looked. Either way, the app is ranking the stories based on shares - some things will trend more than others and float to the top, and other things might get hidden. Perhaps the creator could implement a way to pin stories that are obviously newsworthy to the top to prevent them being overshadowed by less newsworthy items. This does introduce a level of curation to the app, which may take more time than the maintainer wishes to devote to this project.
meteor333
Thanks. I couldn't have summarized better.