Just tried it out and it doesn’t feel quite right on iOS. Almost like the app is just a website loading in a browser. It’s very flat and the UI feels too “thin” (I know that doesn’t really make sense but it’s the best description I of how it feels to me right now).
I guess it just doesn’t feel very native - more of a web wrapper?
It's indeed not a fully native application except on Android. It uses JetBrain's 'Compose Multiplatform' framework for the Kotlin programming language. Without having written code in it myself, it's difficult for me to work out exactly what its architecture is, but it seems closer to Flutter's approach than a web wrapper. My educated guess is that it renders the application inside an OpenGL/Metal graphics context. On Android, however, it looks like it uses Google's Jetpack Compose components directly.
> https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2023/05/compose-multiplatf...
>
> "On iOS, Compose Multiplatform user interfaces are rendered via a canvas implementation based on the graphics library Skiko [Skia for Kotlin]."
>
> So yes — it foregoes native controls for a canvas implementation that leverages the same 2D graphics library used for Chrome and Flutter.
fyi, flutter now uses a new graphics lib called impeller. It's not yet stable for Android though.
I used Kotlin and Compose Multiplatform for iOS. So not entirely native app and uses Material components. Not a web wrapper though, well, except for the reader view which uses webview of the platform.
I'd like the ability to turn off thumbnails, select smaller thumbnails, and select font size in settings.
Would be great to have more control over the view, for some sites/feeds I want large thumbnails, for others I want zero thumbnails.
When I click on the feed's : menu, for share, open website, mark all as read - a check box for display thumbnails would be nice - myabe allow for feed labels, so I can show all "tech" labeled feeds for example....
I tried it out briefly on my Mac but I didn't like it as much as I like Reeder. Granted, Reeder costs $10 to NetNewsWire's $0, but I still consider it excellent value for the money.
I currently don’t have a separate task on GitHub. But GitHub releases are one place to keep track or need to create a new issue or discussion separate for feedbin.
I'm using it every day. I wish you could turn off title truncating, as my style of using the app is to skim through the feeds and only click the interesting articles. Also it would be nice to be able to filter out future items from the feeds, as some feeds use future dates as a way to schedule or announce something, and I would like to see just the immediate news. If it weren't for these two points, I'd say a 10/10 app.
I currently use Nextcloud News, but it's a bit slow (especially with my 50k+ unread items), and doesn't support dynamically ranked feeds, only chronological ones. It's nice having read status synced across devices, though.
No, it doesn't. What you can do is use an RSS proxy to create your own feeds of any site and read that through Nextcloud News. I do this for a few specific sites and purposes - e.g. custom searches on auction sites.
As to Nextcloud News being slow with 50K unread items I wonder whether there's something else amiss as I have close to 600K unread items without undue slowdowns.
The only real slowdown I notice in Nextcloud News is caused by a dog-slow piece of javascript in news/templates/part.content.php which causes a delay any time an item is clicked in the feed. This can be solved by removing everything related to 'sharing' (i.o.w. everything after </time> in the list div (class=utils), make sure to balance those tags...). News is much faster in use that way and since I never use the 'sharing' related stuff - if anything needs to be shared I can just share a link instead - nothing of value is lost.
It’s entirely possible to create a desktop target with Kotlin and Compose Multiplatform. I do have plan to improve the large screen layout support and do the desktop version. My initial priority is to first work on features.
Look, I know beggars can't be choosers, but with the impending demise of Google podcasts, I'm looking for a new podcast player. I don't understand why RSS readers in 2024 don't turn podcast items into little embedded me player widgets.
Not the OP but for me I switched before they went opensource and I was having issues with how Patreon feeds were imported into Pocketcasts. Can't really remember the specifics but if I remember correctly their server was doing some episode caching and it was going all funky.
I stay with Antennapod now because it's very actively maintained and because of the Nextcloud gpodder¹ app and the Nextcloud Repod app². Lets me have a web player and sync entirely within my own infrastructure.
I’m building a free RSS reader with iCloud sync for iOS and macOS, Manabi Reader: https://reader.manabi.io
Currently it’s targeted at Japanese learners and has some optional paid features on top for flashcards/Anki integration and tracking vocab/kanji. But I’m working on “zooming out” the product for general use (including more languages and general knowledge retention) because it has a solid RSS system, readability mode, offline support, web browser functionality etc.
It periodically fetches the rss feeds, and sends the content to a specified email address where you can use your email reader to sort them into folders.
Assuming you have a "good" email client, this takes care of most of my RSS requirements: Free software, offline availability, and the ability to read anywhere.
The only missing feature I think it could use is a nice GUI to manage feeds.
Interesting, I use kill-the-newsletter to go the other way around. But your approach would give a good search and archiving functionality, something that rss clients (mostly) lack. I'm using feedbro (Firefox extension) as RSS client only because I can assign points to keywords to prioritize the huge info volume. The only other client that has such functionality is on Emacs, afaik. Had not tried it.. anyway, it would be cool to find an email client that allows me to add scores to emails based on keywords in the subject and/ or content. E.g. if it says hacker +10, if it says python +5. Oh. Negative values would be cool too. Ok I should go to bed. I'm daydreaming xdd
I use a non-rss solution. Obsidian note taking app with a plugin called ReadItLater. I use it to clip pages I want to read later. Obsidian has really good fuzzy search capabilities and everything is saved in Markdown format with YAML headers.
Yes, I much prefer the idea of comms via email, but news via RSS. Email being bidirectional makes more sense to just stick to comms for, especially with `noreply@` for most newsletters.
It looks pretty nice, but would seem a bit cringe to call your own app "Gorgeous" in a Show HN, like calling yourself a 10 on a dating profile, or introducing your kid as beautiful. I'd personally just leave it out and use something like "Open Source RSS app for Android/iOS"
Yeah, I wasn’t sure if I should include that or not. But some users did highlight that before with the app. So went with it, but yeah fair point. Looks like the title is modified already.
I was initially debating whether to use native UI or not. But Compose Multiplatform offered the flexibility to provide UI for multiple platforms, so decided to try that out instead.
I think I just got unlucky trying Miniflux when there happened to be a bug that prevents the sync frequency from being respected. Once that’s fixed I plan to give it another try.
Thanks, people are entitled to their opinions, so I am fine with it. I am building to learn and play around with Kotlin and Compose Multiplatform and want to have an RSS app I like to use. So, I will continue working on it.
I did experiment with light mode a while back. I didn't end up implementing it. But maybe in future, I will add it as an option . Here is the sample of it
