Review by dyeray
Rated 3 out of 5
by dyeray, 7 years agoI think it is actually pretty good for being a new reader and being built on the toy APIs of chrome/nufirefox. It is probably the only feed reader compatible with FF57+, and has some smart ideas, like the rule system.
My 2 cents on what to improve next:
* Improve feed compatibility (4 of my feeds that work on newsfox give an error on this one).
* Make pane resize area bigger than 1px, since right now is a PITA to resize any of the areas.
* Feed refresh cannot be disabled and be set to manual. Some users only need to refresh when they are going to read the news, and don't appreciate having stuff running on the background all the time.
* It would be nice to have a traditional 3-pane mode like the one on rssowl or newsfox, specially with the function to autoscroll every time the last item is selected, so the user does not need to move the mouse all the time to select the next item.
* Allow to rebind the hotkeys, or at least allowing to use the keyboard cursors to select the next article.
Hope you find these suggestions useful.
My 2 cents on what to improve next:
* Improve feed compatibility (4 of my feeds that work on newsfox give an error on this one).
* Make pane resize area bigger than 1px, since right now is a PITA to resize any of the areas.
* Feed refresh cannot be disabled and be set to manual. Some users only need to refresh when they are going to read the news, and don't appreciate having stuff running on the background all the time.
* It would be nice to have a traditional 3-pane mode like the one on rssowl or newsfox, specially with the function to autoscroll every time the last item is selected, so the user does not need to move the mouse all the time to select the next item.
* Allow to rebind the hotkeys, or at least allowing to use the keyboard cursors to select the next article.
Hope you find these suggestions useful.
Developer response
posted 7 years agoThanks for the feedback.
1. Can you please post the feed URLs that don't work? (or send them to feedbro.reader@gmail.com please). In 99,99% of the cases the reason is that the feed is not valid XML or not valid RSS/Atom/RDF or has timezone set so that feed items are in the future.
2. Resizing should be a rare need but we'll see if a wider border looks ok.
3. In Options you can increase the feed scan interval to 1440 minutes (once every 24h). In the next version there's even longer period and option to disable it. Note however, that many feeds hold only the last 10-20 items. So if feeds aren't scanned in the background, you will lose many items completely.
3. "Autoscroll every time the last item is selected"? Can you elaborate? In the feed panel when you press next (either button or keyboard) the view scrolls automatically if next item is not on the screen.
4. You can use keyboard arrow keys to move to the next article if you hold Shift while doing it (Shift + right arrow = next, Shift + left arrow = previous, Shift + down arrow = next feed, Shift + up arrow = previous feed). The reason you cannot do it without Shift is that then you could not scroll the article with arrow keys which is an important feature when reading articles.
Note that you can also use 'p' (previous) and 'n' (next) shortcuts to move between articles. See the Help for all shortcuts available.
1. Can you please post the feed URLs that don't work? (or send them to feedbro.reader@gmail.com please). In 99,99% of the cases the reason is that the feed is not valid XML or not valid RSS/Atom/RDF or has timezone set so that feed items are in the future.
2. Resizing should be a rare need but we'll see if a wider border looks ok.
3. In Options you can increase the feed scan interval to 1440 minutes (once every 24h). In the next version there's even longer period and option to disable it. Note however, that many feeds hold only the last 10-20 items. So if feeds aren't scanned in the background, you will lose many items completely.
3. "Autoscroll every time the last item is selected"? Can you elaborate? In the feed panel when you press next (either button or keyboard) the view scrolls automatically if next item is not on the screen.
4. You can use keyboard arrow keys to move to the next article if you hold Shift while doing it (Shift + right arrow = next, Shift + left arrow = previous, Shift + down arrow = next feed, Shift + up arrow = previous feed). The reason you cannot do it without Shift is that then you could not scroll the article with arrow keys which is an important feature when reading articles.
Note that you can also use 'p' (previous) and 'n' (next) shortcuts to move between articles. See the Help for all shortcuts available.