April 16th, 2007
by NathanNewshutch update
We added some things and fixed some things:
- Added “test driving” for new users. Now you don’t have to sign up to start using Newshutch, though you will have to sign up to make sure your account stays alive.
- Fixed the annoying Safari scrolling slowness. It turns out Safari has a hard time when there are many items with CSS semi transparency. The “mark read” buttons on each post were the problem.
- Moved the instructions for hotkeys and adding feeds to a new header link, “Tips and Hotkeys”.
- There were other fixes and backend updates too numerous to mention here.
- We will now be accepting advertising, so we’re pitching it on the “welcome” page. We promise to keep any ads we accept neat and dignified. If anyone has any comments or suggestions for how we handle advertising, let us know.
Update: I forgot to mention that under the “manage” tab you can now rename feeds and see if they are stale.
April 16th, 2007 at 2:31 am
@safari: Thanks a lot. Especially on my G4-powerbook scrolling was a real pain.
@ads: I hope you will be able to make some money out of this. A sensible amount of ads would not disturb me at all, so go ahead and I hope the other users will share my opinion.
I really enjoy using Newshutch a lot, so keep up the great work
April 16th, 2007 at 6:52 am
I love Newshutch. But one new UI change is bugging me. You added a “mark as read” link under the date. It appears when you mouseover the entry; that’s totally cool. But because it’s on its own line. The affect is that the whole entry jumps down and jumps back. At least this is the case in FF. I would love to see that link on the same line as the date — so when it appears the entry does not shift up and down.
Blessings — Tim
April 16th, 2007 at 11:43 am
Tim, looks like a minor CSS issue, I’ll fix it.
April 16th, 2007 at 12:47 pm
Did you guys change fonts?
April 16th, 2007 at 1:13 pm
Nice update guys.
One issue though, the font seems to have shrunk
It’s not really pretty on my screen in FF 2, I have to use the zoom feature to be able to read
Maybe it’s a CSS issue too?
April 16th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
I did add “Corbel” before the other specified fonts. It’s one of the new fonts in Windows Vista and the most recent MS Office. Unfortunately the new Vista fonts render just a bit smaller than other fonts, so 13px Verdana or Trebuchet does NOT equal 13px Corbel or Calibri.
This is a shame, the new Vista fonts are really nice but just that small rendering difference can apparently make text unreadable on high resolution but small area screens like those on laptops. Microsoft: snatching user interface defeat from the jaws of victory since 1985.
Anyway, we’ll revert this change today, thanks for the feedback. If the following order of typefaces doesn’t work for you or you have suggestions, let me know.
Planned CSS font order: “Lucida Grande”, “Lucida Sans Unicode”, “Trebuchet Unicode MS”, Verdana, sans-serif;
April 16th, 2007 at 3:11 pm
for what its worth, “Corbel” looks great on a 19″ lcd monitor.
April 16th, 2007 at 11:21 pm
Hey Tim, try clearing your browser’s cache, you might have an cached CSS file mucking things up.
April 18th, 2007 at 6:20 am
All is good; lovely work.
April 18th, 2007 at 10:35 am
Thanks for the update.
The font looks really good, i am for keeping it.
The rename feed option is a nice addition as well.
April 18th, 2007 at 11:21 am
I just started using Newshutch yesterday, and it works like a breeze. But I had problems with a few feeds that I could not add, but which works OK at my blogspot site.
This one: http://www.fritanke.no/RSS/ seems to have a problem with the formatting, but it gets through at blogspot even though the Norwegian characters (זרו) aren’t shown correctly. (That’s not a problem)
Also had the same problem witht his one, which is a search at digg.com
http://www.digg.com/rss_search?search=newshutch&area=all&type=both§ion=news
(”newshutch” represents a random keyword)
April 18th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
Hmmm the font still appears too small. Did you revert the change Nathan?
April 18th, 2007 at 12:42 pm
Here’s another feed I had problems with: http://rss.dw-world.de/rdf/rss-en-ger
April 25th, 2007 at 12:09 pm
Hi Nathan,
Sorry to insist, but I see no change in the fonts.
So either you didn’t change the css or my firefox installation is “compromised” in which case I’ll start worrying
April 25th, 2007 at 4:18 pm
Sorry elvyse, that’s fixed now.
April 26th, 2007 at 11:24 am
Thank you so much Nathan, I feel reborn
May 7th, 2007 at 5:08 am
Just to let you know that I really hate the ad at the bottom of the browser. I understand that you have to cover your costs and make money, but you won’t do that if you alienate your current user base.
Best,
Neil
May 7th, 2007 at 9:56 am
Tha big annoying ad at footer is very bad, I’ll stop using newshutch in a few days if you dont cut it off
sorry for bad english.
May 7th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
Yeah, that new footer ad is a bit of a shocker. If it says, please, PLEASE don’t accept any animated ads. Newshutch is an environment purely for reading information - anything moving in a user’s peripheral vision would render the entire thing unfit for purpose.