Show HN: FlowFS, a Feed Reader to Keep Your Inbox Clean | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: FlowFS, a Feed Reader to Keep Your Inbox Clean

demo.flowfs.com

19 pointsJeffJenkins12 comments

Some good:

* The "queue" design closely matches my use of Google Reader: skim through new items, opening anything interesting in a tab.

* The design is simple, readable & reasonably attractive (except the text shadow on headlines, but that's just my taste).

* Lightboxing of articles is clever & useful.

* I like the behavior of expanding articles in list view better than Google Reader's behavior.

And some bad:

* I can scroll the whole UI up & down by a few pixels. (http://i.imgur.com/LIjQf.png)

* Firefox Aurora takes about a second to switch to the FlowFS tab if it's been in the background for a while. Not sure if this is your bug.

* The "show more" button seems to either fail silently or take an unreasonable amount of time to load. Some visual loading indicator would be nice.

* There's a bug when closing an expanded list-view item. (http://i.imgur.com/UErc8.png)

* I'm not sure how you're going to make money.

Thanks for the feedback! I'll look into those bugs, and I'm glad you like the queue workflow!

Speaking as a wannabe ex--Google Reader user:

1. `N` doesn't move me onto the next item.

2. There are icons at the top --- X, Q, etc --- and I don't know what they mean. I expect there to be mouseover text explaining what they do, but there isn't.

3. It's a bit slow (admittedly this is with Firefox 3.6 on a netbook).

4. "FlowFS, a Feed Reader to Keep Your Inbox Clean" --- When I hear "inbox" I think of my e-mail inbox, and "[keeping my] inbox clean" means (to me) getting down to zero e-mails in my inbox and staying there. But FlowFS is a feed reader, not an e-mail client, so I don't know what the sentence is supposed to mean.

Thanks! I'll get on the keyboard shortcuts and title text now. I'm not sure why it would be slow since nginx is caching all of the demo pages.

About the inbox thing: I wasn't sure what the best phrasing for that would be, but the idea is that you can use the X and the Q buttons to process all of the items quickly so that your "inbox" (the items you haven't seen) stays at zero, even if your Queue (what you haven't read) has things in it.

Oh, I think the slowness is client-side, I'd expect it to be fast enough with a modern javascript engine.

Out of curiosity, why are you using FF 3.x? I don't currently test anything that old, but you're the second person I've run into in the last few weeks who is still using it (the other person was using an Add On which hasn't been updated)

It's the default browser in Ubuntu 10.04 (the current LTS version). When the next LTS version comes out in April I'll upgrade to that then.

It's also shipped in Debian Stable which is what I'm using for my (almost entirely dedicated to server-side programming) office workstation.

> About the inbox thing: I wasn't sure what the best phrasing for that would be

rsszero zeroflow viewzero flowzero zerorss

Maybe it's time to have a naming comp, inbox zero isn't the greatest.

Love the site, though, going to have more of a look around.

As a technical demo, awesome. Off the bat thought can you put tool tips on buttons when I mouse over? It would be cool to know when things did before click on it.

any chance that you do social features similar to the ones removed from google reader - shared items and comments on them ?

Yes. Sharing is in the near-term road map. Comments are further out (although I'd like to find out if I can somehow pull in Disqus comments or similar for the linked pages)

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