The NewsBlur Redesign | Hacker News Reader

The NewsBlur Redesign

blog.newsblur.com

146 pointszengr50 comments

Here's The Verge's article on the redesign launch: http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/21/4350208/how-sam-clay-and-n...

Little by little sure does add up. I've been working on the redesign for iOS, android, and both the web app and blurblogs (blurblog example: http://samuel.newsblur.com) for months now. But by committing every day it builds up. That's been the past four years now.

My favorite part of this whole business is the free insurance policy. If I were to get hit by a bus (or god forbid, decide to stop supporting NewsBlur), you or somebody with the necessary resources could have a copy up and running by taking advantage of NewsBlur's open-source repo: http://github.com/samuelclay

When I got the news about Google Reader being discontinued I tested around 4 alternatives.

Having tried NewsBlur I thought the web UI was perfect for my style of RSS reading and it was fast enough for my needs. The Android app is the icing on the cake.

I paid 36 bucks, the extra, to support a product that I use every single day for more than 10 hours a day, a product I enjoy using and would contribute if I had the knowledge or time.

Thank you very much Samuel, you are doing a very fine job and I am more than happy in helping the only way I can/know right now.

NOTE: I am not affiliated to NewsBlur or Samuel Clay in any way. Just a very happy customer here.

Also a happy user here. Newsblur is by far the best replacement for high-volume RSS power-users that I have found. And the fact that it's open source so I can 1) satisfy my curiosity as to how he is doing things and 2) install myself if the site ever goes belly-up is just icing on the cake.

It's definitely not perfect, but it gets better every day. Performance has notably improved over the last month or so. Kudos to Samuel for a great product. Hopefully someday I'll be able to contribute a bugfix or something to help.

As a Google Reader refugee, I've tried out Feedly and Newsblur, and at the time Feedly was closer to what I wanted from Reader. Now, the redesigned NewsBlur totally ticks all my boxes, very nice.

Thanks for the hard work!.

About the new Android app, has it been pushed to Google Play yet? It still shows the app was last updated on the 10th.

Running a bit late with my comment but I just wanted to let you know i love the redesign. I am a paying customer since the google reader redesign. Newsblur rocks !

Congrats Sam! Funny meeting you virtually ;)

Sam, I'm sure the past few months have been kind to you -- and with your dedication to the product, you assuredly deserve it.

If you get the chance, I'd love to see some sort of before & after the Reader shutdown a la Patrick McKenzie's "Year in Reviews" (http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/12/17/bingo-card-creator-etc-y...). I'm sure you'd have quite a few insights to share.

This could be very well be just me, there are too many clickable things on screen, the UI seems overwhelming.

It's not just you. Almost my entire interaction with google reader is hitting the space bar. After hitting 'u' to get rid of the rest of the ui.

Newsblur does the spacebar thing, (Feedly doesn't), but I can't see a way of getting rid of everything but the river of news.

Great job, I tried newsblur months ago and it didn't click for me. The redesign feels much more natural and snappy. It's a testament to how much features can flourish or suffer from minor performance tweaks and careful design decisions.

For instance before, the bottom bar felt much more cluttered and difficult to understand. It created a sense of claustrophobia, with some subtle design tweaks it now feels like a helpful and compelling navigation feature.

I had the same experience, this time around I'm going to give it an extended try and hopefully it will be worth parting with some cash for.

I moved over to newsblur after the reader news. One of the main features was that it was open source so what happened with reader wouldn't happen again, I could always self-host. After seeing how easy it is to move from one service to another I'm not so sure.

Right now I'm a frustrated customer. All the effort seems to be going into flashy features and redesign while the actual function of a rss reader is not there yet. The basic feed stream doesn't work properly and never has. Items show back randomly after I've already read them and the infinite scroll doesn't work reliably. Bugs about this go ignored. I'll be trying feedbin.me next as I saw several recommendations on hacker news today and it seems to be a no fuss back-to-basics feed reader.

Support is handled every single day and I take these kinds of bugs very seriously. You should email me your username if you are experiencing this issue. Neither my error graphs nor my support forum show issues like unreliable infinite scroll or random stories. Please email me your info so I can get it fixed. I want everybody to have as positive an experience on NewsBlur as I do.

I use the same username here as in newsblur. Here's the bug I submitted:

https://getsatisfaction.com/newsblur/topics/feed_doesnt_load...

It got one reply by "Stuart" a month ago asking me if I was a premium member, which I am. All other activity was by me.

Here's the bug about read items coming back:

https://getsatisfaction.com/newsblur/topics/items_not_stayin...

75 people have marked it as affecting them, it has had 72 replies so far after being opened 2 months ago. Today's upgrade had a bunch of people complaining again with no reply. From what I gather the frontend don't retry the call to mark an item as read when it fails the first time so any problem contacting the backend results in items not being read. Today I had to mark some posts as read 5 or more times.

I may end up using another feed reader anyway since I don't need or want all the newsblur features. That being said getting the "infinite scroll of unread posts" feature right should be a top priority for a feed reader and so far it hasn't been.

The unread issue was fixed 2 months ago. The most recent bug only lasted for 30 minutes and was the result of one of my app servers being down and HAProxy just kept serving requests to it. In other words, 1 out of every 12 requests would fail. Ugh. But that was resolved 7 hours ago, and it seems your bug is more recent.

I just emailed you re: unread showing up again. I don't think it's happened to me since the redesign, but has definitely happened in the last 2 months.

Maybe the issue with infinite scrolling is the same I've previously reported, about stories from another folder showing up when rapidly switching between folders and then loading more stories (which I originally mistakenly assumed to be caused by waiting for some time before loading the next page; maybe you remember our Twitter convo).

I rejected Newsblur when I was looking for a successor because I found no privacy policy for them (as in, a statement of what they do with the data they gather, not a blog post advertising what visibility controls they offer users). This is simply unacceptable for a web-hosted feed reader.

In the end, I went for the Slick RSS feed reader, which is a local-state Chrome extension. Simple, no support for sharing between machines, no folders, but it is well-designed and reliable. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/slick-rss/ealjoljn...

I'm gonna be that guy - I prefer the appearance of the blue version. Things stand out more, it's seems easier to parse. The grey looks all washed out and nothing really sticks outs. The layout of the right-hand panel is an improvement though, definitely.

I went back and forth between both for a couple months and I can assure you that the new design is much better. It looks overly subtle now, but after your eyes and brain get used to it, you'll think the blue one was hideous.

Hi Samuel, maybe you can post the CSS for the blue design to use with Stylebot, https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylebot/oiaejidbm....

Or even better, a guide to the CSS classes so we can use customize and share our customizations using Stylebot. :)

This might be more work for you, but it's open source and tracked with git. You could find the old CSS and do it yourself.

For a future update, it might be nice to have styles be selectable/replaceable by the user (without client-side CSS mods).

I agree that the new styling a lot better with regards to positioning and sizing etc. but the colour scheme doesn't have enough contrast IMO. But I'll give it some time to get used to :)

There's less contrast now, and people with any vision trouble will have additional problems. In the before and after of the reading section, the items in the right-hand column aren't even visible at all. It's white on s super-light cream color. Author & designer both need to look at http://contrastrebellion.com/

I've been using NewsBlur with a paid account since pretty close to the shutdown announcement for Reader and finally switched all of my bookmarks over. I'm happy with the web app, and honestly, the Android app is way better than what I was using when I was over on Reader. There's been a few bumps with servers but they've seemed pretty smoothed out for the most part lately.

tldr keep up the good work, it's easy to recommend to other people looking to migrate. The redesign just makes it even easier.

NewsBlur is the best of the web-based bunch I've been checking out recently, but it's still... not quite there.

For example, this glitch has been around for weeks:

http://dirkjan.ochtman.nl/files/newsblur-glitch.png

I'm also not sure it's quite fast enough yet. I've used FeedDemon and Reeder (and NetNewsWire before that) for so long I'm really used to low-latency feed UI. I think web UI can match that, but NewsBlur isn't quite there yet.

I also think the new design, while much better than the old design, is still quite heavy, in the sense that there is a lot to take in, lots of little details. Personally, I really liked the more sparing design in for example Reeder for the Mac. It would be great if there was an option in the NewsBlur UI to point to a stylesheet (or an inline <style> block) that would allow me to play with customization a bit.

Of course, I also haven't found anything better so far, so it looks like NewsBlur will still be my reader of choice for the foreseeable future.

For what it's worth, I have tried to get started with newsblur a couple of times and ended up throwing my hands up. Just now, I downloaded the new android app, thinking it would be better, and I am unable to complete signup. The ui makes it nearly impossible to get focus into the "username" field because I can only see a sliver of it after the soft kayboard scrolls it up, and no matter what I enter, it says "please enter an email address" and makes me start all over. Not to mention it keeps randomly flipping me back to the "I need to log in" mode of the UI, which is quite frustrating. I can't say your signup flow (or your web site on my android browser, which is a total disaster) bodes well for the attention to detail for something as complicated as a news reader.

Previously in the Android app I could not "mark all as read" as it was an instant core dump.

Now that this works, I do have unread items in the various folders and 'all items', but the badge counters insist on saying '0'.

Add a number of glitches here and there on the web (and really I don't use it via the browser often) and it just doesn't feel robust (and this is a shame, because I want to like it).

Love the pricing part of the page (http://www.newsblur.com/):

Feed poor Shiloh -

Free Account: She goes hungry

Premium Account: Home cooked meals of green beans, sweet potatoes, carrots, and brown rice

I was idly thinking that $24 a year is just north of what I think my dad would pay. If the price was slightly lower I think I could talk him into it.

And then it occurred to me that there could be a pricing model that doesn't scale linearly with number of users, but becomes (slightly) cheaper the more people use the service. I guess I've never seen the concept "economy of scale" applied to a web service as a whole.

In other words, "If we get over 10000 paid users by next year, the price will go down to $20 a year. If we get over 20000 by next year, the price will go down to $18 a year." Etc.

The cons: Shiloh gets less money in the short term.

The pros: Everyone has motivation to recommend the product to their friends. This might outweigh the loss of per-unit revenue.

Like I said, this is just idle thoughts, and there might be some way to game the system, but I just thought I'd throw it out there for your consideration.

Maciej Ceglowski actually did the opposite with Pinboard, in that the signup fee increases over time. I worry that with a decreasing signup fee, you incentivize potential early-adopters into waiting longer until the price drops.

Maybe if they bring the peice down to $1/month or $12 or $10 an year then the number of users might just g up where they are aiming to go. BTW, I have a paid a/c at FeedBin and no complaints till now. Will keep an eye on NewsBlur and some others.

Looks like it's working, they are some incredible conversion numbers. 5,714 Premium vs 7,606 Standard.

for over 15 years i've scrolled down webpages using the arrow keys. can't do this with newsblur. everything else about newsblur excites me and i want to explore it, but having the down arrow go to next story just breaks my usage so hard...

sure i got a mouse. i try to avoid using it too much.

I totally agree with this. It's pretty much the only thing that bothers me about NewsBlur, and it bothers me a lot.

"It’s a full scale redesign, too. And not just one of those redesigns where the icons get glossier and fonts, bolder."

I think it looks the same but with different colors. From that description I was expecting something completely different.

I was a little surprised to find no mention of "import" or "OPML" on http://www.newsblur.com/faq , even though articles like e.g. http://www.extremetech.com/computing/101011-6-google-reader-... say it's a feature.

Of course it's a feature. Either go to Manage > Import, or just use the intro welcome dialog, where OPML import is an option.

But it should be on the FAQ - that was my point.

Still looks like too much needless stuff going on, so I still prefer feedly.com as my Google Reader replacement

Sam,

Thanks for making a great product (was worried in the early days after the Reader meltdown that you wouldn't scale) into something worth paying for again and again. You're really turning NewsBlur into the one to beat and are making it easier to not miss Google Reader. One feature request: integrate Buffer :)

NewsBlur is good, but I don't care for the dashboard opening each time I visit. I'd rather have it remember what I was reading last and open there the next time I login or visit.

I switched to netvibes for now, but I don't like how netvibes wont pick up youtube embedded videos.

I was delaying moving off of Google Reader since nothing else really seemed better (and newsblur was super slow around the announcement). I'm glad I waited -- the redesigned NewsBlur looks awesome, and I'll probably stick with it.

Thanks for hard work! And the fact that it's open source, so I... However I think there are not necessary in it. You should to redesign it more simplicity,because some functions make people more confuse

The design is so complicated to the reader.

i'm happy to pay but want to look at other options too - do any other reader alternatives offer web and android?

It's still nothing like what I'm looking for in an RSS reader, but I'm sure it's good for whoever it's designed for.

The "Try Out Newsblur" button doesn't work in IE8.

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