Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by abrowne 4104 days ago
My quick feedback:

Nice and simple, seems fast enough. I like that it's a responsive design.

I need an option for oldest first. (I can't use a feed reader without this option.)

Needs j/k for next/previous entry.

Top bar should scroll out of the way when reading entries so it doesn't take up so much space.

Default font should be something more readable than Helvetica/Arial. (My suggestion: Source Sans Pro.)

(Disclosures: I am a happy paid user of FeedHQ, but I like trying new feed readers.)

1 comments

Keyboard shortcuts are definitely in the roadmap. Thanks for the rest of the suggestions, I'll consider them.
Another useful feature would be the ability to chose after how many days automatically mark things as read. Honestly, I've stopped using RSS feeds because Feedly has an option that marks everything older than 30 days as read without any possibility to disable it (as far as I can tell). I hate it, but I don't even know if it's a built-in feature of the RSS itself rather than the client.

In any case, your client does not say anything regarding the matter. My apologies in case this is something that can't be controlled.

EDIT: Another, small, thing: probably would be a better idea to make put the bar that, after registration, alerts to "check the email in order to verify the account" on top of the screen rather than on the bottom; or at least chat it's color to something more eyecatching. I don't know if it's only me, but I almost missed it.

Feedbunch does NOT mark entries as read after a certain period. That's not a feature of RSS at all, I guess it is a feedly-specific feature (or anti-feature, I guess, depending on your needs).

What Feedbunch does, however, is limit how many entries it remembers for each feed. The current limit is 500 entries for a single feed; once a feed has more than 500 entries the oldest ones are removed until there are 500 left. The number (500) could be subject to change during the beta phase if users' feedback indicates it is too high or too low.

Thanks, this is a very good news. I'm definitely going to import my feeds right now :)

> The number (500) could be subject to change during the beta phase if users' feedback indicates it is too high or too low.

I don't think if this would be of any use for you but actually, there are websites that in a month produce way more than 500 entries. LifeHacker for example produces something from 730 to 800 entries per month (with very few of them being useful at all... and this is the reason why I decided to unsubscribe). So everything depends on how (and how much) a user checks the reader.

Oh. That's (IMHO of course) an even worse anti-feature, since I use my feedreader to archive interesting stuff from RSS feeds, and removing things after a few months kills that. But I can see how it makes sense for some users, and is a way to limit costs for a hosted offering.
That's the first reader I've heard of that has such an option and doesn't allow to turn it off... sounds like a really bad idea.
The top bar comment is definitely an opinion, and I'd consider it usable with the current design.

Now that I've tried it on my phone, I'd say the default font size is a too small. (I tried Firefox on Android.) On desktop, I can use browser page zoom, but on mobile I can't.

Non-Helvetica/Arial could be an option rather than default, for people who don't want to load an external font.

Feedbunch currently uses the default Bootstrap tipography, so I'm a bit surprised that it gives you trouble. However a couple of you have mentioned it so I'll definitely look into it.

What do the rest of you think about the tipography? Too small, hard to read, good the way it is?

The typography isn't bad . . . but for an app whose purpose is to read articles it should be great!

Helvetica/Arial is common enough, and sites like the BBC use it for body text, but there are so many free fonts available that are much readable for running text.

I'm getting 14 px text for article bodies. Usually something closer to 17 px is optimal, and I think zooming the page 120% looks best (14 px ยท 1.2 = 16.8 px).