Good Noows: A well designed news reader | Hacker News Reader

Good Noows: A well designed news reader

goodnoows.com

30 pointskksm1982011728 comments

I saw that it wanted me to sign up before I could try it out, and clicked the back button. I have no idea if your service is a good one or not, I guess I never will.

And facebook integration? Seriously I think it is quickly becoming the obvious sign of a douchey website. Not saying that facebook integration isn't a useful feature in some sites, but nowadays when I see a site and it has a whole row of social network integration buttons it just looks desperate and exploitative, like the site cares more about using the audience to gain traction than to provide a good service.

Allowing you to login using an id you already have with a major provider saves you time.

One can have a 'junk' account with a provider an use it for stuff like this, if needed.

Edit: Having said that, I agree with your premise that a sign in should not be mandatory to using the site.

And facebook integration? Seriously I think it is quickly becoming the obvious sign of a douchey website.

What? I completely disagree. I'd much rather have other options for sign-in, especially to get around the issue you're complaining about of having to sign up to check it out.

I never sign in to anything through fb connect. I am worried that it will post stuff on my wall on somehow use me to advertise to my friends without my consent.

As someone who creates apps that are somewhat experimental, I have to point out how irritating your comment is. He wasn't asking you to become a customer, he was asking for some feedback about his app, one HNer to another. Sometimes, that involves signing up for the service (gasp!). Perhaps this is a barrier to entry for the OP's potential users, but you could just express that in your comment in a less - to use your terminology - douchey way.

And the offhand dismissal of Facebook integration? Are you kidding? You bitch about having to sign up to use site while in the same breath complain that the OP is providing too many (convenient) ways for users to sign up for the service I'm sad this comment has so many up votes.

That is exactly my point.

Your unhappiness with my comment shows that you care more about what is good for your application than what is good for the user.

No matter how good your application actually is, with that kind of attitude I just can't trust you.

Your second sentence is a non sequitur btw. I'm not looking for easier ways to sign up, I am looking not to sign up at all. If a mugger provided me with convenient credit card and paypal options for how to give him my money, I wouldn't be happy with that either.

Bad things happen to the layout if the screen's vertical dimension is not large enough. The semi-transparent screenshots at the bottom move up over the text.

Also, I didn't like the bar at the bottom of the screen. If feels strange and also gets in the way. Personally I feel that the design could still use some fine tuning.

The bar at the bottom is meebo's in-site-chat script, it can probably be blocked.

Yeah, it's a bit over-designed. The giant purple signup button draws the eye so strongly that at first I didn't notice the existence of a video and screenshots, or the little strip menu along the bottom.

It's kinda like a sales assistant that rushes up to ask if you're finding everything before you've gotten halfway from the door to the shelves...give me a chance to indulge my curiosity first, eh?

Hi there, I am the developer behind Good Noows and I'd like to respond to a few posts here. I currently work on Good Noows in my spare time and I earn my living as a Product Manager at a mobile network operator. I started Good Noows because I simply couldnt find a news reader out there that serves my needs. I assume thats because it's very hard to get funding for it. Google Reader is top when it comes to functionality but I dont agree with their UI. Good Noows tries to address two segments of users and I hope that both are served ok-ish (feedback is actually quite good): 1) RSS reader users sharing my customer pain for a better browsing experience, and 2) the average consumer who doesnt even know what RSS is and just wants to set up a personal news stream (the twitter-like terminology with "stream" and "follow" is intended). Simple and quick.

- No we dont get paid for listing feeds. I'd love that because it would be a great business model.

- Sorry if the predefined sources in the catalog are not what you are looking for. Since I am German I do not have a complete overview of i.e. US-American politics blogs. I definitely was not biased when choosing them. I just used Technorati's top lists and looked for properly formatted feeds.

- The layout is not yet optimized for touch devices at all. Apologies. I hope I'll find the time to work on it soon...

- I decided to use Meebo because their sharing function does a good job. If you dont like the bar at the bottom, feel free to hide it (arrow icon at the right).

- You have to sign on before using it because I (and my legal counsels) see copyright issues when they look at my product vision and feature roadmap. If you re logged in it's private consumption. I won't display third party content publicly.

- Logging in with your social network account just simplifies registration. We dont get any personal data or anything from these auth services, just an ID (which is in some cases an email address).

Feel free to post any suggestions for feeds or features, other ideas, or just criticism here http://support.goodnoows.com I really try to do this very agile and user-focused...

Cheers

Personally speaking, the login requirement was a non-starter. Unless you can work out a deal with content providers to supply at least a sampling of the experience without an account, I'd say you're going to have a tough time attracting users.

What's the deal with this? I see that it's a news reader. But I'll be darned if I can find any kind of description of its features, so I can decide if it's worth my time to move off of Google.

Am I the only one that really enjoys a simple RSS reader like NewFire? Give me a big view of the current article, and every time I hit space bar, move forward to the next unread article.

That doesn't look startlingly like the Times Skimmer or anything.

http://www.nytimes.com/timesskimmer/

Meh. There are several of these for the iPad. Not sure it's super uncommon to have a different browsing interface anymore...

Two things:

1) I need OPML import. Before that's there, all I can really do is play with the interface to see if I like it; I imagine this will be the case for anyone who already uses a lot of RSS feeds. (Other users new to the concept, on the other hand, would be fine getting started with the sample feeds given.)

2) The Meebo toolbar needs to go. I get that social networking is a major focus, but adding an IM client to the interface is not helpful for anyone but iPad users (and even that's doubtful). If you must have it, I suggest detecting the user agent and removing it for anyone but them, or at least giving the option to disable it entirely in the options (instead of just "hiding" it).

Otherwise, it's a great start and I'd love to see where it's going. :)

This is a little nitpicky, but "Noows" keeps causing my speech center to blue screen.

Maybe it's just me, but the only thing i don't like is the toolbar at the bottom. Maybe the site would look simpler without it. And what's worse, the bar is almost useless at least in Chrome, as a link url appears at the botton left every time i hover over one, so that the bar is barely readable. Otherwise great app. I think it will replace Google News for me. I even included a tab with Ycombinator news.

Kind of a wacky set of default sources for the political section. The only independent blog offered in their list of political sources is BigGovernment.com which is a great source of nonsense (let me be clear -- this isn't a partisan complaint. DailyKos is also a source of nonsense). Puzzled as to why they'd even include it.

Puzzled as to why they'd even include it.

Probably got paid to.

It's a little weird that the iPad-ish device on the homepage appears to be running the Windows version of Firefox.

Awful UX for an iPad or touch screen device. Don't know about the rest because i gave up using it after 30 seconds, when i was shown the management panel and noticed how bad it was for touch screens.

I love the UI on this, it's the kind of app that I'd run full-screen because it looks like a desktop app.

I'll give it a proper try when they can import OPML.

I see there may have been a misconception here; I haven't built this app. I discovered it while looking for an alternative to Google Reader.

Locked up on me several times in Chrome.

Me too a few times. The drag and drop feature in the setup window is a bit slow.

I know it's coming, but until Google Reader importing is functional, it's of no use to me.

There are so many new RSS apps out there but it seems like they don't even admit to themselves that Google Reader exists. The project doesn't seem worth doing if you're just going to provide a subset of that functionality.

Do we want to comment on your site rather than the blog post itself? Probably not. Hacker News is an exception because there is a community of like-minded people here; that will not be the case on a generic aggregator. Solving the community issue is more important than dumping a ton of social features on it.

There are some enticing possibilities around RSS readers, but I think they mostly revolve around the incorporation of other ideas into them. Even a modest follower of RSS is going to hit information saturation after 20ish blogs, so a recommendation and ranking service would definitely be useful.

I looked over the screenshots and they didn't wow me. I would have been willing to try it, like the above poster said, if I could simply access the reader and add a feed to see what it was like. I'd understand that my settings weren't saved until I signed up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com