I've built this. Is it worth pursuing or just mad? | Hacker News Reader

I've built this. Is it worth pursuing or just mad?

zoomread.com

17 pointsdaviding35 comments

I think that the idea is great. Needs to be a lot faster.

I also think it would be really nice as an ipad app or any other larger surface touch screen devices.

Agreed on perf. Lots of optimization to do, plus I could pre-fetch cache a lot smarter too (it off-screen caches x&y but nothing for the zooms which are the most painful). Thanks for trying it.

One thing I do when using it to scan many pages is to put the browser in full screen mode - it really helps.

It's an interesting concept.

The "Hold down the left mouse button to start moving" line seems problematic to me, as are the other "mouse" references. I have not has a mouse for year, nor do I have a left mouse button. At least some visitors will be (in fact, have been) on mac laptops or touchscreen devices. I'd recommend something along the lines of "drag the page to move around."

Good suggestion - thanks.

This is going in a great direction, everything worked form me.

I would like to suggest a future direction: be inspired by the Windows 7 Phone and Playstation 3 interfaces and make different branches for different topics. For example, All tech stories would be on the right of the centre, all current affairs stories would be on the left of the centre and pressing some button would bring me back to the beginning; better yet would be if there was a simply a grid for website types, so all stories along a particular line would be of a particular field and the user could customise this and moving arrows up or down would change website type.

Check out the BlueBottle OS (A research OS at ETH zurich) that a zoom based window manager. A video can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe0ZdzO_urU

Thanks for trying it and commenting - people here have been really helpful.

Yes - I've got a few ways to try now for dynamic layout and the 'clustering' of stories. BlueBottle is something I'll check out for sure - thanks.

Nice work!

The problem with zooming is that most webpages are not made for viewing from a distance. It's difficult to discern both the content and the identity of a site when zoomed out.

Maybe you could try detecting the actual content (headline or a big picture), and show just that when zoomed out (probably together with a small logo of the website).

Other than that, the section dividers we see when zoomed out all the way are neat, why don't you preserve them somehow in all zoom levels?

In terms of navigating around, I think it would be much more fun if the zoom was seamless and much more responsive, and one could scroll and zoom at the same time (much like in a QTVR movie, ideally with the same controls).

Thank you! Agreed that I need to so something when viewed further out. I have the RSS feed description/headline (as shown in that big bubble) so I could render something more abstract and cleaner in there.

Base on a suggestion below I am now actually playing with a DeepZoom version, although it seems to be a dead project from Microsoft (not sure). I wanted to stay with pure script, but they do have a very nice zoomable render engine to use...

This is actually really neat! I've always been interested in the idea of a web app that can provide a better browsing experience than a boring list of topics and website links (no offense HN!) Keep on building this!

Thanks for that - really appreciated. I've been heads-down getting this working and to be honest lost a bit of perspective on if it's an ok idea or not.

Did the zooming in/out work ok?

You'll never know if you have a good idea until you try it. And you have, props for that.

The zooming is somewhat functional, but a bit awkward and jumpy. I noticed that the scroll wheel no longer zooms out after I have zoomed in and moved around a bit. Also, I would recommend a more fluid zoom if possible, much like Android and iProducts.

From a user perspective, I would like the article to open up (in a lightbox or new tab) as soon as I click the thumbnail. The little description bubble does not provide much benefit to the user. If there were "jump to 'section'" icons at the top of the window, that would be convenient.

I think I can smooth the zoom, i.e. more like how Google maps resizes when you zoom.

The bubble is something I've struggled with, in that I started with just an overlay icon but it got very 'busy', what with all those thumbnails. I'll try a few more things - thanks.

Those section links are a good idea - I have the 'Overview' link but I'm not happy with the name - maybe 'Map' or 'Sections'?

I really like this but the slow refresh after zooming really kills it for me at least. Perhaps something like Silverlight's deep zoom[1] may be useful?

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645050(VS.95).aspx

Thanks, I'll take a look - I did play with this a little (snapdragon?) but at the time couldn't find a decent API. The backend is all python, so unsure how Silverlight and managed code will fly.

I just wanted to come back and thank you again - in that I've spent a little bit more time researching this and it looks promising. When I had looked before the API was limited, but I think I can do everything I want to do.

In the spirit of a 'hack' I've put a Deep Zoom (totally non-interactive) test harness here to play with - what do you think, better?

http://zoomreadsl.s3.amazonaws.com/seasl.html

(please ignore the layout etc, just gauging the zoom ability and performance)

Sorry I never noticed your reply. Your link is unfortunately broken now but I would love to see it if you still have it around.

Background: Spent the last couple of weeks working on this weird graphical RSS Reader. Not sure where to take it next, but put it up here for comments and feedback. Any advice, i.e. is it a viable startup idea?

Hi David, I have a couple of ideas and looking for a technical co-founder. I have over 10 years of IT experience. Do you have time to team up with me and build a profitable venture?

Thanks Vivek

Hi Vivek - thanks for taking a look. Unfortunately this is more a 'labor of love' thing for me, and I'm fully engaged it a few other things at the moment. I appreciate the offer though.

Pursue it as a learning project and resume booster, not as a consumer oriented startup (ie. don't try to get a lot of users and make money from them somehow). You might also be able to sell the tech to some content company, as in: "NYT, buy this from me and I'll put all your archives in it and you can add it as a way to browse your content". Or with a license. Good luck.

Good advice - thank you. I certainly not betting the farm, and was actually quite reluctant to show even here - basically because it's just something I'd built more for myself as way to cluster/build out large pages. I use a couple of EC/2 machines to process out and I've had a lot of fun playing with this so far.

What a neat idea.

Suggestion: Sub-segments that are visible as transparent overlays on the next two levels down so you can zoom in on a particular kind of content, rather than just the 9 categories. I understand that would take a lot more tagging of content.

Lowest level could be a frame with the actual article so links and such would work.

Thank you! Yes, I've got some things to try on overlays as at the moment the top level zoom levels are static pre-generated.

What kind of subsections would you like to see? I did render a larger map, but for this test just did '6x6' sections as it's easy to get lost.

That's a tough question, I was playing around with 'segmenting' news a while ago and I ended up taking the top two levels of dmoz as a starting point, but there was a lot of editing and moving stuff around before it made any sense.

Maybe the meta tags from the various articles would give a hint about the possibilities here ? Those+titles could be used as 'hints' as well during the viewing of the map.

It would be better if articles snapped into focus when double clicked. Is this inspired by ZUIs, or just an independent concept?

I could try that - thanks. I wasn't sure how much to move the map outside the dragging by the user but that makes sense.

Since I just had to look the acronym ZUI up, I guess that's an independent concept :). I've tried to use Google maps as an inspiration as I find it such an interesting web app.

This needs to be an ipad app. I think it would really benefit from the ipad's multi-touch interface.

I agree (I'm typing this on an iPad now!) but wanted to see how far I could push the web side, mainly because I could get it ready for comments quicker plus not keen on I-dev work (ptr flashbacks etc).

I've started adding touch events to the web client code, but not done yet. I'm having doubts it'll ever be as smooth as native of course.

Thanks for the comment btw...

Neat, but I would not use it as is. It looks like you are adding the magazine-rack back, without removing the "noise". Can you customize the sorting, filtering, and style of the pages (Readability bookmarklet)?

Thanks - yes, I can do many of those things, and next plan to tackle 'what to show at what level'. It's all pre-processed and fairly quick to generate so I have lots of options to consider in terms of noise/overload.

I think it's a pretty awesome idea, although I found myself wanting a bit of inertial scrolling happening with my mouse (not a touch pad, an actual mouse).

i think it would be neat if scrolling left and right gave you different topics/stories, and once you found one worth reading, scrolling up and down would give you things related to that one.

kind of like how i typically read wikipedia. find an article, see a link to something related, middle-click it to open in a new tab, keep going off tangentially until i forget what i was originally reading.

One thing I did consider but haven't thrown in is the idea of what happens when you get to the biggest thumbnail (lowest zoom) and then zoom in again. I was thinking it could take you to a related pages map, with its own zoom levels. Example : Start in US News, zoom down to a NYT story about llamas, once at lowest level it'll the browse down to all llama related stories. Something like that?

also see http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/

Thanks for the link - yes, similar. I'm going for more of a bigger 'map' up/down/left/right and in/out style browse, but fastflip is pretty similar (I had seen it before I started this and quite liked it for the way it shows the thumbnail).

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