Chris Meller has written up a great review of FeedLounge. He does a great job explaining the way things work and I’m glad to see he thought the interface was easy to use.
There are just a couple of things I wanted to follow up on from his review:
If you’re on the Home page, I think it should refresh the display when you click Home again. … A very simple change to make, but I think it could make the user navigation experience much easier.
Two things here:
- When new items are pushed to the browser there will be no need for the refresh.
- Refreshing the interface each time adds server load and makes it much slower to navigate to a specific item. I think you’ll change your mind about this when you start using the other views. When we implemented the “no refresh” change in-house, it was greeted with a “wow, that is way better response.
When you have an entire tag group selected, there’s no way to tell which of the blogs in that group posted the entry unless you click on it to read it.
Um, in the split screen interface, if you hover over an item it *does* show the blog name. in the 3 column interface the blog name is right below the item title. Not that this won’t ever change or be improved, but that is the current behavior.
What if there were also an option for flagged items under each tag group as well?
You haven’t tried this yet, have you? Add tags to a flagged item then browse that tag on the Tags screen. I think you’ll like what you see there.
Most of the time, the labels for all my tag groups seem to “flicker� up and down a pixel every second or so.
As noted in the forums1, we think this is a Firefox issue. It only happens on Firefox for Windows (as far as we know), and we’re hoping for some help identifying the issue and working around it.
I already can’t find a post I read earlier today…
You mention you haven’t used the History screen - here’s your chance!
- A number of issues mentioned in the reviews have been discussed in the forums. [back]
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FeedLounge adds this Trackback:
Chris Meller’s FeedLounge Review
Chris Meller has written up a great review of FeedLounge.
I’ve added a couple of responses to a few of the points on my blog.
…
July 23rd, 2005 at 10:12 pm
Chris Meller adds this Comment:
Ohh, official linkage… I feel all warm and fuzzy inside… Anyway, to follow up on a couple things you said:
1 - When you click the ‘Home’ button, shouldn’t everything refresh? That just makes sense to me. I don’t think everything should refresh every time you click on a particular feed to view its contents, although making sure that particular feed has the right number of unread entries displayed next to it would help (I’ve had several instances where I’d click a blog, see 4 items, but only have a (3) next to the feed name).
2 - I hadn’t noticed any hover name for items. Since FeedLounge is down ATM, I can’t check and see, so I’ll take your word for it.
3 - Ahh, so when you flag an item, it becomes an entirely seperate item? Why should I have to tag a feed, then go and tag an item I flag from that feed? As I’ve said, I’m not big on tags. I much prefer to sort things into folders, rather than manually typing tags for each item. That’s just the way I work. Despite that, your whole idea of seperate tags for feeds, items, and flagged items seems a tag confusing to me… Again, maybe that’s just me.
4 - No, I haven’t used the History screen, and I see where it would come in handy in this instance. However, I can cite numerous times where I’ve read something in a blog in my RSS reader (like a security bulletin from Microsoft, for instance), and then gone back to look for it later, not to remember when (or even where) I had read it. Was it actually in the Microsoft feed, or was it a comment made about it when someone else linked to it in their blog? Aww, crap. I also don’t remember WHEN I read it. The history feature is no substitute for a search utility. It seems like such a simple and sometimes pointless feature, until you need it and it’s not there…
Thanks for your comments, Alex. Still glad to see you guys are paying attention to your users!
July 23rd, 2005 at 10:30 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
Didn’t I answer this? I did, I even gave two answers!
Huh? Perhaps I’m not following, but flagging an item just makes it show up in the list of flagged items.
You don’t have to tag anything.
Tag a feed, it shows up tagged in the feeds list. Tag an item, it shows up in the tagged items list. Flag an item, it shows up in the flagged items list. Seems pretty simple to me.
Did I say it was?
July 23rd, 2005 at 10:38 pm