[leephillips]

This looks great, and comes at a perfect time for me, as I was looking for a replacement for the supremely annoying Google News on my phone. You've made all the right decisions, eliminating the misfeatures of Google and other news aggregators.

[bruce_lipshitz]

> You've made all the right decisions

Thank you, it means a lot to us to hear that because we've largely gone against the current trends.

> eliminating the misfeatures of Google and other news aggregators

Just curious, what misfeature do you think Google News and other news aggregators have that annoy you so supremely?

[leephillips]

Google is the one I’ve used recently, so I’ll talk about that.

There is no way to turn off images in the main display, that I can find. There is a “Ken Burns” pan-zoom effect added to the images. Some of them are in a carousel, with superimposed text: as you’re reading it it is replaced with the next item. All this combines to make the home display sandpaper to my corneas. Newshound uses the browser, so it already works the way I want it to. For example, I have images turned off while using mobile data.

If I click on an item in Google News, it opens in its own browser, regardless of the settings. I need to select a menu item to open the story in my default browser. Newshound’s approach of keeping everything in the browser makes sense, since we’re just using the web after all.

Google tries to figure out what I want to see, and does a bad job, despite allowing me to vote on news items. One good feature they have is to hide all stories from particular sources - you may think about adding this. But using algorithms to divine my interests is unlikely to work for me, although it might be useful for other people. My writing work causes me to frequently change the topics that I’m tracking.

Those are the main things I can think of right now. Thanks for developing this and making it available. I will certainly make a donation.

[bruce_lipshitz]

That's a very comprehensive review of your experience with Google News. Thanks for taking the time to write it.

> One good feature they have is to hide all stories from particular sources - you may think about adding this.

Do you have any particular news source that find you have to hide all the time? With Newshound, we've been thoughtful about which news organizations we source the stories from, so just curious if we've made a bad choice somewhere.

> My writing work causes me to frequently change the topics that I’m tracking.

We're planning a feature that will allow a user to keep track of a topic over the course of time. We still don't know if people will find it useful enough to pay for it.

> Thanks for developing this and making it available. I will certainly make a donation.

Thank you as well, not just for your detailed and positive feedback, but also for the encouragement and faith in our work. :-)

[leephillips]

I didn't mean to suggest that you have any news sources that I would want to hide, just that it was a generally useful feature. But maybe it was useful with Google News because they presented stories about celebrity gossip from TMZ, or whatever it is.