Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcantelon | Hacker News Reader

How is this useful (honest question)?

It's much much faster than loading and rendering the html, images, and ads on the actual sites.

I can zoom through articles pressing the left/right arrows with no perceptible latency.

Unless I am totally missing something you can't actually read the content without clicking on it. Is there much value in seeing an unreadably small thumbnail of a site before you choose to click on it? I suppose on mobile devices it might work. Loading a small blurry thumbnail could save you the time it takes to load the full page. If it indexed all of Google's searches it would be pretty neat. Previewing thumbnails could save a lot of time wasted on obviously bad results. Maybe that's where this is heading in the future. If not it's really pointless on anything other than a mobile device IMO.

A lot of people seem to be missing this: clicking on a thumbnail gets you a full-size image of the article in Fast Flip, it does not send you to the original site. You're not expected to read the content from the thumbnails, you select your first article from the list of thumbnails and then fast flip between the full screen versions.

That makes a lot more sense but it unfortunately is not working on my browser. Clicking on a thumbnail does nothing. Probably a bug with WebKit nightlies I guess.

This is especially true for mobile devices with limited bandwidth.- http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/mobile

Grr at lack of Blackberry support. I feel like I own a neglected step-phone.

I can't even read the headlines on many of the thumbnails...

Why use this instead of google reader?

10,000 unread articles.

Who tell you to read all 10,000 unread items ?

Google Reader is slow and not very efficient when you have a lot of subscriptions but unread articles is not its problem. IMO Google Reader's home page can be improved more than just displaying new articles. It could display most read, most recommended articles etc ... from your feeds.

You mean, it could combine search with rapid preview?

Oh, wait.

> 1000+ unread articles

FTFY.

Never thought we were going to see prerendering of webpages :)

I second that question. I browsed through some of the articles but fail to see the appeal. Technically it's a nice little trick but usability-wise I can't see myself using this.

What was your last magazine purchasing experience like? You might just not be part of the target demographic if you aren't one to flip through a magazine or a newspaper.

That's an apples and oranges comparison.

Following your logic we should have TFT-displays with bendable corners, so we can make "real" bookmarks...

Agree with you. I see no use for it at all. I'd rather view the headline/snippet approach of Google News, Techmeme, and other sites.

You and others agreeing with you are making the (self-centered) mistake of assuming that you are the market.

You are not.

As they indicate in the about page Google intends the target to be people who flip through magazines and when they see a title that interests them or a picture of someone they recognize they then read the article.

Whether that market exists or will be the actual market (if any) of this "product" remains to be seen.

I'm a Google News user, and think yes, I am the market. I also read and skim magazines (your definition of the market). In general, for all content, all people skim to choose what to read. It's what printed layout, and even web layout, is based upon (with possible exception of scientific/research journals - those always give me a text overload headache).

In my opinion, I could see something like this working if it was presenting me with printed content (say the actual print newspaper or magazine, which in some instances you can get in pdf viewer format that is similar to this). But for web content, the existing method is better. The new format is actually harder to read/scan (and I'm using a 22inch display). So I expand the many articles to one per page, and use the arrow navigation to go article to article. The result is more time spent trying to catch up on news, and more clicks since I have to bypass the articles I have no interest in reading. My choice would be to go elsewhere if this was all Google News provided.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com