My Dream App

The mockup finally does the highly visual idea Herald some justice with eye candy, but I’m confused by the “torn out” section, and even the weather forecast. In my mind, Herald would work a lot better if it were more tightly focused on presenting RSS feeds, and RSS feeds only.

Neat concept, though I think the biggest challenge you will face is making something that looks great on screen that is quite readable. Paper works in a different way than pixels. Also, there are plenty of little things that work on paper that don’t work on screen. In your mockup, having the type be justified on both the left side and the right side means that you get some awful wordspacing issues that really interfere with legibility. Tofu is a great little app that manages to get this right. I think your best bet would be to design a better way of reading text onscreen than adhering too closely to the newspaper metaphor, which is cute at first though could quickly get tiresome. That said, I’m a fullscreen fanatic - when I’m reading, all I want to see is the content. If you created an app that did that well, perhaps using a safari plugin where I could find an article and press a button and instantly I’m browsing it cleanly like this, I’d be a happy camper!

I’m not sure there’s a market for this, but if there is, I think printing is the key feature. There are already a bunch of good desktop and web-based feed readers, and the fact that they don’t aggregate everything together into a “customized newspaper” isn’t a bad thing. When I’m reading at my computer, my feeds are “all together” because they’re all right here on my screen. *But*: if I want to print stuff out to read while I’m offline, it’s a real pain in the ass right now because I’ve got to print everything separately. I think you should concentrate on the printing aspect — people who commute to work on public transportation might love something like this.

Could be a great interface but it would be hard to make a visual metaphor like this work over the more ergonomic likes of NewsFire or Safari RSS.

What I like about the idea is putting a more user-friendly face on consuming RSS feeds. But putting it into the context of newspapers is not the right way to go. Digital newspapers tried to get off ground for several years now without real success. Much of the content I subscribed via RSS is more or less throw-away content which isn’t worth the paper it should be printed on. Focusing this idea on making RSS more accessible to the masses makes more sense to me but the newspaper idea has worn off.

From the sound of it, Herald appears as though it will mimic the newspaper-layout of Microsoft’s recent “Max” RSS aggregator. I think you should strongly consider the final goal for Herald. The RSS aggregator market is probably the most dense of any type of application out there. Herald would have to be remarkably different while retaining its down-to-earth functionality. How many people can you vision listening to their feeds spoken to them on their iPod? How about people printing out their daily feed fill? I can’t even remember the last time I printed something. Maybe some mockups would help clear things up.

I live in my RSS reader, if I didn’t it would be hard for me to visit the 700 sites that I keep track of on a day to day basis. I’m able to keep track of said sites precisely because my reader doesn’t force me into a newspaper metaphor. It just serves no purpose, if I wanted to read a paper I would buy one and be done with it. Give me a list of feeds in a linear format and I’m happy. I should note that I also hate HTML email. Plain text rules.

I suppose the iCal integration is clever, but once again I don’t want to be forced into an outmoded format to get my information. ‘I wonder what I’m up to today, let me print out my paper.’ Doesn’t work for me.

I’ve seen this idea a bunch over the years; someone once took a newsreader I wrote for NeXTSTEP and tried to modify it to do something similar for his PhD. But the central problem remains unsolved: how do you populate your paper with actual interesting content? Sure, it’s easy to say, “I like this comic, cut it out of the web for me every day,” (and in fact Leopard does this already), but how do you go to a news site and say, “Uh, show me only the articles I’d find interesting.” If Bogumil is just talking about reading every article from an RSS feed, then, well, I feel like we already have an interface for that, and I can’t imagine how you’d map such an incredible volume of stuff automatically onto a couple pages. (Consider that newspapers are, like, hundreds of pages long, every day.)

You could attempt to winnow the RSS pipes’ content down by using the new Latent Semantic Mapping framework in Leopard — the user could rate articles and “Herald” would slowly learn what she liked, much as Apple’s spam filtering learns what you dislike. But that’s not really specified in the original Herald idea.

I feel that this one’s gonna go pretty far in the contest. It’s a concept that people seem to be gravitating toward like moths to a flame. It’ll definitely have the eye-candy factor going for it.

My gripe with Herald is that it’s just not an app that I’d use myself. There are tons of RSS readers available and they do the job just fine. I just don’t see people taking the time to set this up as much as it would need to be if it were to be really useful. And as for the printing part, well…save a tree people!

This is an interesting idea, but the problem is that I’ve heard variations on this theme for the last 10 years. Many people have tried to bring the newspaper format into the digital realm and nothing has stuck yet. The problem is that the format and interaction experience of the offline world don’t translate that well. The medium dictates and constrains the experience, and it’s usually best to reinvent when you change mediums.

RSS represents a great way to get information from one’s favorite websites, but it is generally reserved for the tech-savvy. While there are many existing news readers, their feature sets are often quite similar. With an approachable interface, Herald could appeal to a whole new crowd and lead others to new ways of dealing with RSS. It would be an excellent means of pre-packaging information for friends and relatives, or even preparing it for consumption in other media. The main obstacle will be duplicating the functionality that many already expect in an RSS reader, but then again, it will be worth the effort.