Prismatic for iPhone is now live in the App Store | Hacker News Reader

Prismatic for iPhone is now live in the App Store

getprismatic.com

84 pointsw01fe48 comments

Welp, I am going to be the lone dissenter, I guess.

I didn't like that it wanted to link to an existing account. I don't trust Facebook as far as I could throw the entire company, so that one is right out. I don't have a Twitter account. That just leaves Google. Fine. I do that, and it says that it maybe wants to fiddle with my Google Reader settings? If this thing adds or removes items to my existing set of feeds, I am going to be upset. And even after that, I have to create a Prismatic account, along with a new password. Great, another password to remember. And I'll bet you ten bucks I'll be forced to unsubscribe from the spam they start sending me in a few days.

After that, it required what seemed like nearly endless setup. Pick interests. Pick publishers. Now sit through seven or eight screens where we insist on showing you how it all works, rather than letting you discover that for yourself.

I bailed at about the second "help" screen, and deleted it. It's a very nice-looking app, but I would have to want it really, really badly to go through that much hassle. And I don't.

Thanks for the review - saved me from even going to their website.

I have the attention span of a 12 year old without their Ritalin for all these "YC app du jour" sites these days.

Why not scroll continuously in the reading list? The gestureness of the scrolling behavior seems jarring to me.

I'm also curious to see how many gestures new users are willing to learn. I count five, which seems like an awful lot.

Very slick, though.

PS: I notice what you did with the first image in the app store screenshots (having a slice of the second image on the side). Very clever. Shame there's no way to measure whether that works.

I'm a big fan of this snapping, page down scroll style. It moves as fast as I can scan yet never halts in position that renders one (or two) entries unintelligible. Should I want to get to a totally different set of stories I can swipe left.

This app is phenomenal. Other readers (e.g. Flipboard) make too many sacrifices at the altar of design. I enjoy playing with them at first but the information density just isn't high enough for me. Prismatic gets the density right without being overly utilitarian.

I only started using the web version this week so I can't speak to the intelligence component yet.

It seems pretty good, however, I have a major pet peeve with the reading layout. At least on iPhone, they stick 3 random tweets about the article right in the middle of the first paragraph. You just begin reading an article, and have to scroll through a page of tweets before you can read the rest of it. That is very annoying.

Also, how about pre-fetching the full article when I start to get close to the end of the preview? Once I'm interested in the article, I have to click a button and wait for the entire web page to load before I can read the full thing. Also, to read the full article, I might as well be using Safari because it's just a UIWebKit view. I lose all of the formatting and have to deal with the site's native formatting, which is quite jarring.

Overall, a good first attempt, but please fix some of these issues.

I had not seen the tweet injection as I tend to read less popular stuff. Having just looked at a nytimes article, would have to agree that it's quite abrasive.

Am I the only one who wishes they would charge for this? I'd love to start using it, but I don't know what their business model is or how they'll be using my data, so I'm far less inclined to start. If it were 5 or 10$ (or even more?) I'd honestly and happily give it a try.

What will it cost you if it goes away? We're not talking about changing e-mail hosts.

It's not just about Prismatic going away. You can learn a lot about me by what I read. A popular way to make money is to sell that information. If I can't see how you make money, I'm going to assume you are selling my information. I'm not necessarily against that, but I really want to know what you are selling.

Just curious, why does the app make me login to Facebook via a web browser window, instead of just hopping over to the Facebook App, letting me hit Approve (or whatever it says), then hopping back to Prismatic, like other apps do?

Prismatic is an awesome service. I've really enjoyed using it for the past few months. It's nice to see a mobile application so I can be just as obsessed with it on the go.

However, I agree with rabidsnail, I think the multitude of unique gestures are too much for most users to take in and there are some odd choices like pull to refresh even though the concept seems to be an infinite list, and jumping to titles which makes the scrolling seem jerky.

Still, the core functionality is there and I will definitely use the app on a daily (if not hourly) basis.

Great job!

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback! We've put a lot of work into the gestures, and during user testing most users seemed to find them intuitive. But if you have suggestions or other ideas about them we'd love to hear them.

For pull to refresh specifically, you're right that it's not really necessary -- the best way to use Prismatic is to just keep reading and scrolling down. But it's something that many users seem to look for (both on the web and on mobile), and so we decided to put it in to support this style of browsing for people who want it.

User testers (at least the kind you get on a site like usertesting.com) are very highly motivated. A paid user tester will keep at it long after a real user would bounce.

It might be a good idea to run experiments adding UI elements (and removing the walkthrough steps) for some of the gestures when you start getting a significant flow of new users.

These users were mostly random people in coffee shops, on the street, etc. I'm sure there's still a bias when someone is looking over their shoulder, but we could get a pretty good idea of whether average users 'get it' right away or floundered. We went through about 5 full redesigns of the walkthrough based on this testing before we arrived at the current version. Of course, we'll keep experimenting and improving in future versions.

Looks fantastic. One thing that is confusing is how to add additional social accounts. The startup process lets you link one (e.g., Facebook), but it is not evident how to add another (e.g., Twitter).

Thanks for the feedback. We're revamping this part in the next version -- for now you can add Facebook or Twitter directly from the share box, or sign in on the web to associate your Google account and get suggestions from Reader.

Fantastic. I love the swipe for settings. Coincidentally, I just started on adding almost the identical thing to an Android app I'm doing that needs very simple gestures so it can be used in the car.

The only jarring note is that when selecting things, the cue from the orange tick is removed and remains very faint. It's slightly hard to scan as the visual difference between a tiny tick and a tiny plus is so small.

The app is great.I can easily see myself using it daily. One feedback though -- while the ios app is incredibly fast and slick, some of the gestures and menu is not intuitive enough. Like - where are my settings (twitter/fb etc.) ? Can I change my email / password ? I guess others are providing similar feedback below and I hope that some of these 'small' things improve in the next version. Great app though !!

Thanks for the feedback. On the web you can see those settings in your profile, but unfortunately profile didn't make it into this first version. For now you can configure this stuff on the web, but we plan to fix this omission in the next version -- thanks for bearing with us.

I am really left feeling like i have gone to deep into the forest when stacks just keep piling up. Even if i press "Home" in the menu, it just ends up being another page added to the stack.

It really feels like i've made a mess using this app. I can't take mess. And it takes some time to clean it up. Why do you do this? It must be some memory concerns to this as well?

The intro is fantastic. It's actually quite fun to learn how to use the app. Smooth, informative, and fairly entertaining. Bravo!

Congratulations for the launch. Prismatic has proved to be a great service for me. I am waiting for an Android app.

Thank you! This was the first step towards amazing Prismatic clients for different screen sizes and platforms.

I love the font they used, it's almost Helvetica, but I find it slightly more readable - that may just be the fact that it's non standard. It's got a nice density to it.

Running through Identifont, it appears to be AG Old Face BQ, is that correct?

Very similar to Basic Commercial as well, though.

http://cl.ly/image/1v2238121W0l "Manage your contacts" and "Perform these operations when I'm not using the application" ? Why do you need access to my contacts?

I just loaded the app up. I really enjoyed the beginning animations and how the gestures were taught. I personally feel the gestures are intuitive and easy to pick up.

Congrats on the launch!

Is there a way to create an account and tell prismatic my interest without logging in with any social network account? I would prefer to keep things separate.

Sure, you can create a "stealth" account that's not attached to any social networks. You'll miss out on our automatic interest suggestions and the ability to share out to your friends, but you can always attach those accounts later.

If you create a stealth account you'll get a canned set of suggestions, but you can still use search through our hundreds of thousands of topics and publishers to tell us what you're interested in.

Uh, so I created a stealth account on my desktop, so I could easily generate a random password. Then logged out, preparing to log back in so the browser would remember my account. But I can't find any way to log back in, only create another account. What am I missing?

What platform are you browsing from? There should be a login link at the top right of the landing page.

Oh, the main page seems broken in WebKit (I was using Safari, also broken in Chrome). I can see the login link with Firefox.

I like the idea but am confused about the interface.

Once i added the FB feed I can't figure out how to get back to find the Twitter and G+ feed

Congrats! Hopefully Android is coming soon! :)

Android app is on our roadmap. This app was the first step toward amazing Prismatic clients for different screen sizes and platforms. We have a couple of big changes to the core product before we become ubiquity focused.

Awesome release, excited to read more now. Does it sync offline at all? It appears to require a connection all the time.

Thanks! Offline didn't quite make it into the first version, but it's coming soon.

Congrats Bradford and team!

Thank you! We hope you love the app.

Finally! They teased this on twitter and dribbble for way too long.

I'm so sorry we teased you guys for so long but you have to admit some of our buzz videos were enjoyable. :-)https://vimeo.com/47600364 We hope the wait was worth it.

how do I tie a username into an account that already has the social accounts plugged in? :) i tried to do that a while back, but it just created an orphan account!

you already have a username, you just may not know it (if you signed up long ago it was automatically set to your twitter handle). Email feedback@getprismatic.com with account details and we'll help you out.

Prismatic for iPhone is now a featured app in the App Store.

Congrats on the launch

Thank you! After months of slowly building and perfecting the iPhone app it feels great to finally be able to share it with everyone.

Congratulations! What was the hardest and/or most rewarding part?

I am assuming you abandoned most of stock UIKit and built custom implementations.

Thanks!

Hardest and most rewarding was all the serious engineering we did to make the app and gestures fun and fast. Most of the components in the app are custom, from the navigation controller to the story menu down to the scroll physics. Aria just answered this Quora question that goes into some of the details.

http://www.quora.com/Prismatic/What-were-the-techniques-Pris...

If you have any particular things you'd like us to elaborate on, we'd be happy to answer your questions.

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