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Feedly is an example of an app that is extremely over-designed in a counterintuitive way. It is a remarkable case of form over function. "There's a list of art

Feedly is an example of an app that is extremely over-designed in a counterintuitive way. It is a remarkable case of form over function. "There's a list of articles, one per line, stacked vertically on the screen. After you've scanned your eyes to the bottom of the screen, how do you see more? You scroll it up, right? Ha ha ha. No. You swipe right. Madness." Oh. THAT'S how you do it. I thought it was impossible to scroll down a list of articles. When you swipe down on an article list, feedly alternates between showing you a single article and a portion of the article list. I have no idea what the intended function is. And do the different width bars on the homescreen mean anything? I switched to newsblur which looks like it's from 2003 and has a terrible home page. But at least it doesn't surprise me.

nickpinkston 13y ago
Fully agree! It doesn't hold a candle to the gReader interface...
davidjohnstone 13y ago
I definitely agree. Once made to show full items by default, Feedly became acceptable for how I use a feed reader. However, this option only appears to be available on the desktop site, and not on the Android app, and all the other options feel too weird; the cards and magazine layouts look pretty, but are completely unusable ("I just want to read my feeds!). Yoleo almost does it for me, except I sorely miss the ability to scroll through a list of unread items (it forces us to hit J or click on the next entry in the third column to make the next item visible). I find the NewsBlur UI awfully clunky, and I will admit that I can't bring myself to actually using it as the replacement. However, it exposes an API, and I built a much simpler UI for it: http://www.altfeedreader.com/ http://www.altfeedreader.com/ — it doesn't do everything that NewsBlur can, but it does 99% of what I want in a feed reader. In the end, I haven't settled on what I will use, and there's still Digg Reader (to be released tomorrow) and AOL Reader (released, but buggy enough to prevent me from adding anything when I tried it).
- jamiebikies 13y ago
  I'm working on a "headline mode" that's going to let you scroll through your articles.
  - anu_gupta 13y ago
    Hopefully with the option of showing the full article content from the feed.
krzyk 13y ago
And more over it requries a browser plugin (at least for firefox) to even function, why? And most of the time it just doesn't work - keep displaying that it is updating (maybe it doesn't take proxy into account?)
- jasonngpt 13y ago
  I hated the browser plugin too. But I think they have a web-version now, cloud.feedly.com I have a flaky experience using the cloud.feedly.com. Sometimes it logs in, sometimes it doesn't. Just tried and I am able to login. for now...
wmeredith 13y ago
Yeah, Feedly's interface can't seem to get out of its own way.

nickpinkston 13y ago

Fully agree! It doesn't hold a candle to the gReader interface...

davidjohnstone 13y ago

I definitely agree. Once made to show full items by default, Feedly became acceptable for how I use a feed reader. However, this option only appears to be available on the desktop site, and not on the Android app, and all the other options feel too weird; the cards and magazine layouts look pretty, but are completely unusable ("I just want to read my feeds!). Yoleo almost does it for me, except I sorely miss the ability to scroll through a list of unread items (it forces us to hit J or click on the next entry in the third column to make the next item visible). I find the NewsBlur UI awfully clunky, and I will admit that I can't bring myself to actually using it as the replacement. However, it exposes an API, and I built a much simpler UI for it: http://www.altfeedreader.com/ http://www.altfeedreader.com/ — it doesn't do everything that NewsBlur can, but it does 99% of what I want in a feed reader. In the end, I haven't settled on what I will use, and there's still Digg Reader (to be released tomorrow) and AOL Reader (released, but buggy enough to prevent me from adding anything when I tried it).

jamiebikies 13y ago
I'm working on a "headline mode" that's going to let you scroll through your articles.
- anu_gupta 13y ago
  Hopefully with the option of showing the full article content from the feed.

krzyk 13y ago

And more over it requries a browser plugin (at least for firefox) to even function, why? And most of the time it just doesn't work - keep displaying that it is updating (maybe it doesn't take proxy into account?)

jasonngpt 13y ago
I hated the browser plugin too. But I think they have a web-version now, cloud.feedly.com I have a flaky experience using the cloud.feedly.com. Sometimes it logs in, sometimes it doesn't. Just tried and I am able to login. for now...

wmeredith 13y ago

Yeah, Feedly's interface can't seem to get out of its own way.