Lector - A news reader for people who want one simple thing

http://mauriciogardini.com/post/53784250046/lector-a-news-reader-for-people-who-want-one-simple

25 17 13 years ago

tux1968• 13 years ago

Signed up and added a few feeds, added a double by mistake, couldn't figure out how to remove it. Waited 10 minutes and still no items in any feeds. Could turn into something nice, but I think the $36/year is a little premature at this point. Will check back.

juliogreff5• 13 years ago

We're now finishing the interface to properly manage your subscriptions. Should be online within a week or so.

About the feeds, the updates are taking a little longer than expected, it's around 15 to 20 minutes now. HN effect probably, I'm working on speeding things up. Let me know if things are still not working for you.

crux• 13 years ago

This might be sufficient for a first draft but it's also a great illustration of a lazy cliche that I'm seeing a lot—especially in this newly invigorated field, feed readers.

This is the sort of app that leads to minimalist-style marketing. '...One simple thing: read'. The current crop of online text editors has a similar impulse: 'The app for people who just want to write.' What these apps' creators mean is that their apps strip down the experience to the bare essentials of the activity, and don't throw a lot of extraneous bullshit in your face when you're trying to get your reading/writing/weather-checking done.

Which misses the mark a little bit. If your interface is simply a recapitulation of the received wisdom around feed reading, or text editing—if your app looks like what you'd get if you took all the feed readers that have been made and incorporated only those features that occur in all of them—then you haven't achieved minimalism. You've achieved superfluousness—the very thing you were trying to avoid!

Minimalism, as we should all know by now, isn't simply not including features. It's putting a lot of hard work into eliding the cognitive load around the accomplishment of a specific task. The text editing web app that sets my world on fire won't be another Markdown-enabled text box that lets me go to full screen, it's going to be a Markdown-enabled text box that understands my intention and fulfills it in ways that I, not being a brilliant application designer, have not yet imagined.

At the very least, if you can't or won't tout a new, whiz-bang feature, get me excited about what it is that you've cut away, what you've devised how to do without, to really deliver on the promise of simplicity (that is, simplicity of use—not design or construction) and essentialism. On the other hand, the promise of a wide range of features to come, many ideas to be implemented, seems to work directly against the header of this article. One's audience should not be, I believe, people who want one simple thing now and a bunch of neat gizmos later.

juliogreff5• 13 years ago

You got a point. About the features to come, I have to disagree with you tough. We didn't disclose on the page what features we're going to include, so I don't blame you. On the top of our list, there's pubsubhubbub (so your news get to you faster), a mobile webapp, offline reading and some interface tweaks that a lot of people told us they want. I don't consider this "neat gizmos", they are only supporting the one simple thing you want, which is reading. We'll not be adding tons of social features, fancy viewing modes or anything like that.

deanacus• 13 years ago

Certainly looks nice. I'm primarily curious as to whether there'll be mobile version (whether app or webapp). I couldn't see anything about it in the post or on the site.

$36/year might be a touch too much at this point, but if with a mobile app, I'd definitely be willing to pay it.

juliogreff5• 13 years ago

We're planning to add a webapp for mobile very soon, right after we fix the issues that invariably will pop up from the launch. We'll be avoiding native apps for now. Offline reading is also on our plans, if that's important for you.

irq• 13 years ago

Does this service provide an emulated Google Reader API endpoint so I can point client programs at it (like iOS's Reeder)?

juliogreff5• 13 years ago

Not yet, but we wouldn't be opposed to implement it if there's enough demand. It may take a while though, as we have other priorities atm.

muglug• 13 years ago

If your app is designed to do one thing, please take the time to find a typeface that is incredibly legible, and then set it so that scanning long paragraphs is a simple matter.

That condensed typeface you've chosen, and the fit-to-width paragraph size make it harder than necessary for users.

helper• 13 years ago

The one feature that I actually care about and no one seems to have is full text search of your feed history. This is a feature I'm willing to pay money for. Why isn't anyone doing this?

mauriciogardini• 13 years ago

Yeah, that's a feature that I want too, helper. We even discussed about it when we were deciding the features we would include in this initial release, and we decided not to include search at all. For now.

Full-text search is a feature that is very resource-intensive, and providing something like that for now would be like a shot in the foot: for us, that manage the servers, which would have a bad time trying to balance the things; and for you, users, which wouldn't have a good user experience.

So, yeah, it always've been on our mind, but not for now.

jhasse• 13 years ago

It's missing "All feeds". ("What's new" has no list view)

Otherwise very good job! I like it :)

juliogreff5• 13 years ago

This has been requested a thousand of times already, and we're listening. It's on the top of our list. We're dealing with some problems about feed data right now, but as soon as they're fixed we'll start working on it.

dysoco• 13 years ago

The fact that we have created news readers for people who just want to read news, and blogging platforms for people who just want to blog, shows us how much we have degenerated... This shouldn't be the exception, but the norm.

moseymosey• 13 years ago

http://readable.cc

anakha• 13 years ago

In light of all the recent talk of privacy, I'd want to know more about how this is handled by the service. The web page is remarkably lacking in any click throughs for detail on the bullet points. Definitely a sticking point for deciding whether to sign up.

frio• 13 years ago

The design of this seems very similar to yoleoreader.com. I'm not having a go; I suspect that as this market space becomes more popular, we will see lots of similar designs (even if they're arrived at independently) -- but it might be worth spending some time to differentiate yourself a little more.

Lector - A news reader for people who want one simple thing

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