July 10th, 2006
by NathanNewshutch Version 1.0.2
Newshutch has been public for 6 days. We’ve gotten lots of high quality feedback. Many thanks to everyone who’s commented, told their friends, and used the application. When you build an application you develop blind spots; that’s why there’s no substitute for feedback from real users.
Officialy we just rolled out version 1.0.2, not that any of you should care about the version number. The best thing about web applications is that you don’t have to burn a million CDs, pack them into boxes with manuals, ship them to Office Depot, and pray that everyone buys upgrades. Instead, the next time you go to Newshutch it’s a little better and you didn’t have to install anything or (horror!) submit to a Windows Update.
New features in this version
- Browser button to add feeds: This is fantastic. Now you don’t have to go through the pain of copying and pasting web addresses into Newshutch. Now you just click “Add to Newshutch” in your browser toolbar and that’s all.
[Update] I neglected to mention that for the browser bookmarklet to work, you need to stay logged in to Newshutch via the “Remember Me” checkbox. We’ll fix this in an upcoming revision.
- Keep unread: While this remains checked, the entry will remain “unread”.
- Filter entries based on freshness: I use this when I want to dig through “read” items, but I don’t want to see all the older entries.
Enhancements
- When showing both read and unread entries, the unread count appears instead of the number of all entries in a feed.
- There are also a number of back end enhancements that make the application more snappy and reliable.
July 10th, 2006 at 3:04 pm
Loving the new features (especially the Keep as Unread!)
Rock on,
Scott
July 10th, 2006 at 8:05 pm
Thank you VERY much for the browser button. Got the add feed funtion to work nicely with the Firefox Livelines extension. I’m stoked. Absolutely great service you have here.
July 11th, 2006 at 3:36 pm
I’ve notice as I use this more and more 2 things:
1. Seems like thing’s I’ve marked as read resurface every once in a while. Haven’t really figured out when it occurs.
2. On long articles I love the ‘open next’ links except sometimes I don’t want to go to the next one and a little ‘back to top’ icon would be cool so I could get to my feed list. Something unobrtusive like a small up-arrow.
What fonts, size and spacing are you using for the article text? They are very readable and I’d love to change my blog template.
July 11th, 2006 at 5:11 pm
Scott,
Can you give me an example of a feed where you’ve seen read items resurfacing? I think I’ve seen this once or twice. It could be that a site’s feed file or TTL is updated even though the content is the same.
If you’re on a Mac try Command + page up/page down to jump to top or bottom. On Windows, try CTRL + Home/End.
Since every computer might have different fonts installed, I can only tell you the order in which we specify fonts. If the first one isn’t available, the next one might be, and so on. From the style sheet:
font-family: “Lucida Sans Unicode”, “Bitstream Vera Sans”, “Trebuchet Unicode MS”, “Lucida Grande”, Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif;
line-height: 130%;
July 12th, 2006 at 9:59 am
Nathan,
I the resurfacing of feeds seems to happen a lot. I’ll try and pay more attention to which ones it is happening to and report back here.
July 13th, 2006 at 9:25 pm
Hi guys,
It seems that this feed reader is going to be the one for me (i had been looking to a decent one for 4 years now!). But it seems that i cannot upload properly my Bloglines OPML file for my subscription… any clue? I have the “Application Error (Rails)” meesage. FRUSTRATING!!!!!
July 13th, 2006 at 10:17 pm
Sorry about that Bob, hang tight, the Bloglines import issue should be fixed in the next couple of days.
If you could, email the offending OPML file to me: nathan d0t bowers at newshutch d0t com. This will aid us in testing.
Thanks for the heads up.
July 14th, 2006 at 9:30 am
You are apparently designing on a monitor with the gamma set incorrectly (or just too darn dark). It is apparent that you wanted the background on your LOGO image to match the page background.
It doesn’t and so it looks a bit silly. Change the color value in your layout.css for the body background to #323855 to correct the problem.
No charge.
: )