A Tiny Tiny problem

As a former Newshutch user, I have very high feed reader standards. Since Newshutch shut down their service earlier this month; I have been forced to seek for alternate web based feed readers.

Of course no one matches the style, elegance, and neat user experience of Newshutch. But I found a Tiny Tiny RSS reader that might do the trick. With some work, that is.

Tiny Tiny RSS' lead developer Andrew Dolgov have done some great work, released under the GPL. It is a front-end interface build on MagpieRSS as a XML/feed parsing engine. Overall the web application (AJAX) is very good.

However Tiny Tiny RSS have a tiny tiny problem with it's user interface. The interface it self is somewhat cluttered. But it is amazingly clean for being so cluttered with bells and whistls! Anyhow, the real problems lies in its user interactions and disapointments.

Sometimes this does that. Another time the same thing does something slightly different. The user is left disappointed and confused. TT-RSS also lacks a good, defined, and usable workflow. Currently there is no workflow in place at all! You can work trough it with many clicks and it all takes up way too much time.

This is where I come in; user interactions. I have been working on—or nagging Andrew with every tiny idea or suggestion I have had about improving—the user interaction and cleaning up the interface.

Strongly inspired by the workflow devised by Nathan Bowers, Newshutch's II genius, and with my own experience from using tons of feed readers and user expectation understanding; I am trying to create a great workflow for the user in TT-RSS. Actually it is just the new Akregator workflow all over.

There have been a lot of things to work on. From the completely obvious to the obscure. Most of the features and hard coding is built in already. However it is not put in place correctly. Over the last two weeks Andrew and I have managed to work out a much better interface. It is available from in the hosted version.

Another problem with TT-RSS is that it does not scale, and is not suitable for public installations just yet. This is not my area. I think TT-RSS will be a good platform for setting up a public web based feed reader in the future I hope others will get their eyes up for this great reader as well.

It is nice to finally start giving more than money to open source. I am actually giving experience and helping out with something other than bug reports!

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