A Feed Is Born

RSS Voyage

by Juned on July 17th, 2007

At the first page only two short paragraphs at the center of an almost blank page hits you. The first page is a curtain that welcomes and instructs you on how to use and enjoy the RSS Reader Voyage by Andy Biggs. I learned about this news reader from the RSS Compendium Blog. It is a refreshing and flash powered take on the RSS Newsreader. Just read the two short paragraphs that introduces and gives instruction about the news reader:

Voyage is an RSS Reader with a difference. It’s been carefully designed around the content it displays. Add RSS feeds from your favourite sites and let voyage pull all the information together for your reading pleasure.

How do I use it? Its simple. Posts are organised by date. To scroll through them just use your mouse wheel, or the up and down keys on your keyboard. Add and remove RSS feeds using the management pane at the bottom.

After a few seconds the first page and opens up to the main newsreader page. Unlike most readers you get a black page with the articles and feeds available to you by date and you get through it by virtually swimming across the screen. It is fun to use. Article/post details available include: Title, Source, Short lead sentence, date, and URL.

London-based Interactive designer Andy Biggs developed and is still developing RSS Voyage. Wrote to him an email asking him about RSS Voyage and a few more tidbits of information about Voyage: (i) Voyage was as an experiment to write 3d code in flash (ii) Voyage was done to develop a more useful way to sort articles and for the reading to be more interactive. And a blog or an RSS intereface would be best subject to develop 3D and may have some benefits. (iii) Voyage is a work in progress. The current version is beta and the us readers testers.Andy goes on and explains the initial feedback of the users and future plans for Voyage:

… While most people agree Voyage looks pretty, its readability and speed are rather poor. I have also received a lot of feedback from users mentioning that they do still like their feeds to be sorted by feed source. So when get some free time I plan to address some of these major issues. I think I can address the speed issue by rewriting the code in the latest version of flash (ActionScript 3). By looking at the design again I am pretty sure I can start to improve the readability of the copy. When I have substantially more time I will then start to look at addressing the sorting by feed source and I would also like to start displaying the images in feed items as well.

At this stage I am grateful for any feedback I get, good or bad, as it will improve my next version of Voyage.

Aesthetically, I really like RSS Voyage. Hopefully, Andy can improve it further. Anyway, Thanks to Andy Biggs for promptly answering the email. Do check it out and send him some feedback.

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POSTED IN: RSS Readers