August 17th, 2008
How do you want feed categories to work?
We have a ton of new features in the pipeline for future versions of Feeds. There is much debate as to how we should implement the feed categories so this post is to hopefully get some opinions from some of the people out there using Feeds.
The main debate about categories is whether they should be done inline (like Contacts does letters or Starred Feeds does titles) or if the categories should be split up into folders (like Mail app). It seems that the latter method (we will call it ‘inline categories’ for ease of reference) would be great for quick organization of a small number of feeds. If you have more than a handful of feeds, the former (’drill down categories’) method is definitely the way to go. In addition to the ease of organizing large numbers of feeds, the drill down method lends itself to have items for ‘view all unread messages in this category’ or ‘view all messages in this category’ and it would provide a nice, simple way to see how many unread items are in each category.
For illustration purposes, below are a couple images showing what the difference would be between the drill down method and inline:
Inline Categories
Drill Down Categories
If anyone has an opinion feel free to leave a comment or use the contact form on the main page.
Comments
Drill Down Categories would be preferred. a few other things the app would benefit greatly from;
1) an “all unread feeds” category on the home page
2) number of new articles in feed “TechCrunch (12)”
3) Ability to show only unread, or all.
4) Ability to keep an item unread, even after reading it, to keep it in the “new” listings.
2) better feed discovery - we don’t always know the url, and it would be nice to be able to discover new feeds we were unaware of, within the app.
Those things would make this the perfect app. I want to stop using Google Reader and just use your application, but I need better ways to organize as I mentioned above. Thanks for a great product.
Justyn
Justyn
August 17th, 2008
I’d like to see the number of new headlines available in each feed. I feel it’s the one feature that’s lacking for me. It’ll save having to drill down to see each feed and backing out if nothing is there.
Love the product! Keep it up guys!
p.s. also a feed finder would be nice too
John
August 17th, 2008
Personally, I prefer the folder approach since I have a lot of feeds and they’re easily categorizable (Sports, World, Local, etc).
Keep up the good work!
Carlos Luz
August 18th, 2008
- ability to disable automatic sync of feeds / sync manually;
The reason I’m asking this is because I usually download all feeds in the morning at home via wifi, before leaving for work. As the morning goes by, I like to read every now and then the news I downloaded at home, but often I don’t want any extra charging of EDGE/3G traffic, especially when I don’t have wifi available, hence the reason of my request;
- ability to edit the display name of each feed;
- news count for each feed.
Carlos Luz
August 18th, 2008
Hi Justyn, Thanks for the feedback. The new version is going to have the number of new articles per feed in addition to Categories. Feed discovery is a bit of a tricky one. There are certain meta tags that the site owner need to provide in order for us to be able to discover them and unfortunately a lot of sites don’t bother to put them in. We were planning on adding an “all unread items” row as well so expect that in the next version.
You are the first request for being able to mark an item as unread. If this turns out to be something a lot of people want we will certainly put it in.
Mike
admin
August 18th, 2008
John, number of unread items is coming with the big update (categories, offline mode, ability to rename feeds, etc). Expect it in the near future.
Thanks for the feedback,
Mike
admin
August 18th, 2008
Hey Carlos, We have offline mode coming in the same update as categories. That will cover your need to turn off traffic to the server. The new version will also give you the ability to edit feed titiles and it will display the unread count for each feed.
Thanks,
Mike
admin
August 18th, 2008
Hi,
I think I prefer the drill down categories. But be sure to incude a global “all unread feeds” category like Justyn said.
Regards,
Florian
Florian
August 18th, 2008
Hi Mike,
glad to hear
Just to have a rough idea, the update that includes the offline mode, is it due in days or weeks?
Carlos Luz
August 19th, 2008
I would prefer to have the Drill Down Categories as well.
This option is preferred over the Inline Categories as it appears to be less “scrolling” and also has a better appearance.
Simple navigation is best when it comes to the iPhone.
Thank you for listening to our feedback.
Jiub
September 11th, 2008
Jiub, we are now officially live with drill down categories.
Enjoy! Mike
admin
September 11th, 2008