Sysadmin, platform gamer, fiancé.
3 stories
·
0 followers

indie rock asterisks

1 Comment
Today on Toothpaste For Dinner: indie rock asterisks


Read Drew's blog: The Worst Things For Sale.
Read the whole story
whereismyjetpack
4182 days ago
reply
So true
Pennsylvania
Share this story
Delete

The NewsBlur Redesign

26 Comments and 36 Shares

Not to say that NewsBlur was ugly before today, but it certainly didn’t have the loving embrace of a talented designer. So without waiting another moment (or month) I proudly present the NewsBlur redesign.

image

It’s a full scale redesign, too. And not just one of those redesigns where the icons get glossier and fonts, bolder. Every moving piece of machinery got more than a coat coast of paint. A number of new crucial reading features have been added. Some features were merged, some were repaired, and some were scrapped.

Dashboard before & after:

imageimage

Reading before & after:

imageimage

In no particular order, here’s what’s new:

  • Unified interactions/activities popover. Gets out of your way and gives the dashboard more room to breath.
  • Rewritten feed loader, offering incredible performance, even at the 20x scale of today vs 2 months ago before the Google Reader announcement.
  • Custom vector graphics, retina-fying the entire site.
  • Increased transparency of sites by showing more detail in feed fetching/statistics.
  • A new List view to complement the Split view for stories.

And that’s just for the website. The iOS app, Android app, and blurblogs all got the update goodness that has graced the web app.

image

>The Android app got a nice coat of paint, although there's plenty more to come in the next month. <img src="http://dev.newsblur.com/media/img/welcome/header-android.png" width="307" height="323" style="margin: 0 auto;" alt="image" /> >

As for what’s happening these days, post-Reader:

  • Took some extra time to scale out my backend, now completed.
  • Running on 48 servers, serving 20x traffic
  • Because I had the foresight to charge users for premium service, I’m now confident that NewsBlur will be standing tall a few years from now.
  • Working on the next few big ticket features: saved story search and tagging, batch editing organizer, keyboard shortcut manager, and more.

And if you’re new to NewsBlur, here’s the six core benefits to using the one with the Sun:

  1. Training - hide the stories you don’t like and highlight the stories you do. Make mincemeat out of heavy feeds and make sure to never miss stories from the feeds you love.
  2. Original site - read a publisher’s stories the way they wanted you to read it - on the original website. NewsBlur embeds the publisher’s site in an iframe, and marks what you read as read as you scroll.
  3. Text view - conveniently extracts the story text from articles, necessary for reading truncated rss feeds.
  4. Blurblogs / sharing - a social community where you can share and discuss stories with friends.
  5. Speed - A dedication to fast load times, graphed on your dashboard.
  6. Mobile - native, first-class iOS and Android apps, with all of the functionality of the website.

Now that the redesign has launched, I plan to blog about how to best use the intelligence trainer efficiently, all new [future] features, and how I was able to successfully scale out the four databases (count ‘em: postgresql, mongodb, redis, elasticsearch) to handle more than 10,000 users and 4 million site updates a day. It’s no Tumblr, but it’s still way more traffic than you can fit on a single machine.

Thanks for using NewsBlur and turning my passion project (four years running) into a full-time dream.

Read the whole story
whereismyjetpack
4200 days ago
reply
Thank you. I will gladly keep paying for pro now!

Pennsylvania
Share this story
Delete
22 public comments
oliverzip
4196 days ago
reply
Still on Google Reader and looking for something better?
Sydney, Balmain, Hornsby.
brokaw
4198 days ago
reply
I found my Google Reader replacement: NewsBlur
Austin, Texas
stsquad
4198 days ago
reply
Yay :-)
Cambridge, UK
MatthewMk2
4200 days ago
reply
The Newsblur redesign is great. No they just need to release a BlackBerry 10 app.
Canada
samuel
4200 days ago
I tried, but the blackberry importer made an APK that crashed on load. Apparently somebody else side loaded it successfully, so YMMV.
MatthewMk2
4200 days ago
I've actually been using the Android app on my Z10 and PlayBook for a few days now. I ran the Android app through this site http://apps.goodereader.com/apk-2-bar/ and it works just fine for me. It'd still be nice to see it officially released, there aren't really any good RSS readers on BB10 right now so I'm sure a lot of people would use it.
Romanikque
4200 days ago
reply
Worth the fee all over again!
Baltimore, MD
TheRomit
4200 days ago
reply
So pretty!
santa clara, CA
Michdevilish
4200 days ago
reply
I like it
Canada
pmanthena
4201 days ago
reply
Looks great: just please add on the search feature!
marcell
4201 days ago
reply
"As for what’s happening these days, post-Reader:

Took some extra time to scale out my backend, now completed.
Running on 48 servers, serving 20x traffic
Because I had the foresight to charge users for premium service, I’m now confident that NewsBlur will be standing tall a few years from now.
Working on the next few big ticket features: saved story search and tagging, batch editing organizer, keyboard shortcut manager, and more."
zagreb, croatia
yayadrian
4201 days ago
reply
I've been using the beta version for a while and really like the new design.
Leicester, UK
habmala
4201 days ago
reply
Really like the new design.. +1 for keeping up the good work..
Sweden
samuel
4201 days ago
reply
My favorite part of the NewsBlur redesign are the new blurblogs.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
trekkie
4201 days ago
reply
Awesome new redesign details for Newsblur
Wake Forest, North Carolina
aaronwe
4201 days ago
reply
Been using Dev for a while. Love the new layout. Wish this comment box were much, much bigger.
Denver
grammargirl
4200 days ago
Cosign this. Even just another couple lines of height would help. It's super hard to edit comments as-is. I do really like the redesign, though!
tedder
4201 days ago
reply
cheers!
Uranus
bsag
4201 days ago
reply
Great-looking redesign of NewsBlur, both on the desktop and iOS. It's easier to find the features, too.
robzienert
4201 days ago
reply
Love the update.
Minneapolis, MN
mistercheese
4201 days ago
reply
Looks good! Good job! I can't wait for the Android update.
San Francisco, California
diannemharris
4201 days ago
reply
I like it! I think it is much more readable now, with more focus on the content than the delivery system.
ameel
4201 days ago
reply
Yay!
Melbourne, Australia
JayM
4201 days ago
reply
Very nice!
Atlanta, GA
christophersw
4201 days ago
reply
Love the clean new interface!
Baltimore, MD
Romanikque
4200 days ago
The mobile versions are the bomb.com

Google chairman admits Google Glass can be “weird,” “inappropriate”

1 Share
These? Awkward?

Google has long seemed blissfully unaware that Google Glass doesn't so much step on the toes of etiquette as it doesmildly assault them. But speaking at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government on Thursday, Google executive chariman Eric Schmidt admitted to a little bit of awkwardness with speaking commands to Google Glass, stating that sometimes the glasses can be “inappropriate,” according to Reuters.

Schmidt has championed Google Glass since itsunveiling last year , wearing the glasses everywhere from stages to subways . Sets of the glasses come with a small panel of controls mounted in the headset, including a touchpad, but the primary method of interaction is telling Glass aloud what to do (“OK, Glass, take a photo”).

But Schmidt stated in his talk that executing the voice commands is “the weirdest thing” and noted that society will, of course, need to develop new etiquette to make itself comfortable with these devices that enable surreptitious image, video, and audio capture. Schmidt appears to take the idea that society will accept them at all as a fait accompli.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read the whole story
whereismyjetpack
4222 days ago
reply
Pennsylvania
Share this story
Delete