River of News. It is a style of reading RSS feeds where all the posts are jumbled together in one big mash, unlike Bloglines et. al. which sort posts by feed source, and even user generated folders. When you read with RoN, you surf along, never bored too much by one source because the next one could be totally different.
The concept has been around for a while, but there was only one online news reader which did it, well, until now, and that was Google Reader. Sure, it was slow in the beginning, but I loved the fact that it was so simple: titles on the left, content on the right.
Now what do I find when I load Reader at like 8 pm tonight? Clutter, extra clicking, dreaded folders, and no more River of News. Sure, the developers like to assure us:
Well, things might look different, but we made sure the new interface enabled the reading style of current Reader users. For example, clicking “All items” and choosing “List view” should make the experience feel quite familiar.
But, really, that setting just doesn’t cut it. In the first place, it doesn’t use all of the screen space. The titles are displayed on the right, and clicking on them opens them up, pushing all the other titles down. But that leaves 1/2 of my screen wasted with Folders which I made over a year ago and don’t use, and a link to the “Home” section of the reader which is utterly useless. Ok, not all of us have a huge LCD, an I have a 12″ laptop which only does 1024×768, and I need all the space I can get.
Luckily the haven’t taken away the old interface, and I hope they never do because I have tried other readers and I just can’t do it. Although, the more I look at the content of my feeds, the more I think that maybe this is a good thing.
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This entry was posted by Steven Chabot on Thursday, September 28th, 2006, at 11:13 pm, and was filed in Philosophy.
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