Author Archives: @feedly

Design Empathy

Super interview of the founder of IDEO about design empathy. This is another viewpoint on the benefits of being obsessed about who your customers are and how they use your product.

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Design Empathy

Here is a great presentation from Braden Kowitz on optimizing the design process. Lot of insights around empathy and the importance of testing often and early. Arthur has been putting a very similar process in place this year when we designed the new feedly mobile.

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The New Feedly Mobile – iOS and Android

We just released a new version of feedly for iOS and Android. New look, richer personalization and simpler navigation are at the heart of this release.

—
It available now and continues to be free:
Apple App Store
Google Play Store

Special thanks to all the beta testers who have been working behind the scenes over the last three months to help polish the experience. We love you for all insight and suggestions you provided.

[Update] We are working on a couple of priority 0 issues reported over the last couple of days:

Issue #1: if you use Google 2-factor authentication, then you will need to create an application specific password to be able to login to feedly. Feedly will remember it. We are working on using OAuth2 to avoid this in the next release.

Issue #2: The application crashes on iOS 4.x. The work around is to upgrade to iOS 5.1. If that is not an option, we will have a build out within the next 10 days which addresses this issue.

If you run into an issue, we are here to help:  log an issue

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Preview of the New Feedly for Android

We have a new iteration of the new feedly+android preview. If you are interested in a test drive, please send me an email to android@feedly.com and I will send you the instructions on how to install the preview.

We have been working over the last 9 months on a new version of feedly mobile. We are performing a set of previews before pushing the build to Google Play. Join the party. Have a sneak peek and help us improve feedly before the release!

Gestures. we spent some time simplifying gestures in this new release. here is a quick overview.

  • Swipe down on an article snippet to mark the article as read.
  • Swipe down more to mark the entire card as read.
  • Swipe up for keeping article(s) as unread.
  • Press and hold to save/unsave

[Update. Crunching through the feedback as it comes in. Compiling list of things people like and the things they would like to be fixed in the next iteration of the beta. This is *very* useful. Thanks you!]

The good:

  • I LOVE the new UI. So slick [Julian Finn, Nexus 7 and Galaxy S3]
  • Amazing! Very close to the web experience. [Winson]
  • Very happy about the dark theme. Happy about the “share using” button’s return. [Dom Bonanni /Motorola Droid 2]
  • Awesome. Love the overall changes [Bryan Garvin, Nexus 7]
  • Overall the app is a fantastic improvement: The biggest improvement is speed.  It feels a lot faster.  Not sure if that’s true or not, but it certainly appears to be the case. Swiping is faster and the articles seem to load a lot faster with less lag.  The layout and font choices are an improvement.  It feels more like a modern app.  Love the updated overlay with the colorful bars that come across showing story count. [Brant Tedeschi / HTC Thunderbolt]
  • Love the redesign. The visual aesthetic is very refreshing [Daniel Burgess / HTC EVO 4G]Excellent job on the new interface. Very refined [Brian Pittman, Nexus 7 and Moto Triumph]
  • I like the clean and polish look compared to the previous build [Santa Chhat / Galaxy Nexus]
  • Really loving the improvements overall [John Childs / Nexus 7]
  • Loving the black theme (Night) [Nootish Han/Samsung Galaxy S2]
  • The new feedly+android is a huge improvement over the last one. I just love the new theme and the new font [Varnavas Kotsonias / Xperia Arc S]
  • I absolutely love the new Feedly. It looks a lot sleeker than the current one, much cleaner and just as easy to navigate. [Mohamed Samir/ Galaxy SII]
  • Looks wonderful! [Jean-Baptiste Rouillac, Galaxy SIII]
  • The app looks stunning! Great work on the visual part, in my opinion it’s a lot better than the previous version. Loved it from the first sight  [Marcin Malinowski, HTC Sensation]
  • FANTASTIC [Mike Stevens]
  • Feedly feels smooth as ever [Thomas Wahrlich, Google Nexus S]I love the new build, it is the smoothest one yet [Cong Nguyen]
  • Very quick and responsive, and it looks great on my device [Dylan McCall, Nexus 7]
  • I like the new app, the UI is much improved and it’s faster. It’s very similar to the web app. I like the easy swipe access to the feeds side bar [Rossen]
  • This is a very nice upgrade, visually it is very very beautiful.  I love it.  Works pretty well too.  It makes the most of the screen real estate on my 7” tablet, it is very well executed.  I feel it is a good improvement over the previous version (and compared to the current version available on the iPad). [Eric Morin]
  • Beautiful. Facebook sharing is also fixed where previously it had issues on Galaxy Nexus. Like the new and improved look [Lee Yoke Kuan, Galaxy SIII, Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 7]
  • The app looks awesome. It’s powerful and beautiful and yet simple. Amazing job! [Seba Porta / Galaxy SII, Kindle Fire]
  • Love the new UI. Feels fresh, clean and modern [Dave Feltham]
  • I love the new interface. It is quick, user friendly and seems to be very reliable. My favorite new features are the color-coded categories for feeds on the left as well as the addition of integration with “Pocket” for saving pages [Kevin Drummond]

The “should be improved”:

  • Vertical scrolling in inlined articles should be smooter [Santa Chhat / Galaxy Nexus] Fixed in 10b5
  • Margin of the popup menu is off. See http://i.imgur.com/ROVzf.png [John Childs / Nexus 7]  Fixed in 10b5
  • black line flickers in and out when scrolling through the list of articles: http://i.imgur.com/8rJRw.png [John Childs / Nexus 7]  Fixed in 10b5
  • Disable the swipe to open store gesture. It conflicts with the swipe to next article gesture [Varnavas Kotsonias / Xperia Arc S] Fixed in 10b5
  • Permanent filters and/or the ability to save a search as a feed. Like, “Android” in “Gizmodo.” Alternatively, a reductive filter. Like, “Everything but Windows 8” on “Engadget.” I realize this is possible on some feeds, but it’s neither intuitive nor standard [Dom Bonanni, Julian Finn]
  • Better integration with Instagram/Flickr  [Winson]
  • Angry that the “open in browser” button is the Safari icon.  [Dom Bonanni, Motorola Droid 2, Steve Edson]  Fixed in 10b5
  • More layout options [Bryan Garvin, Nexus 7]
  • Had to login twice for OAuth to work [Brant Tedeschi / HTC Thunderbolt]  Fixed in 10b5
  • Smarter suggestions based on historical click patterns [Brant Tedeschi / HTC Thunderbolt]
  • When wired to Pocket, the saved for later section should show the content saved in pocket [Daniel Burgess / HTC EVO 4G] // Talking to the Pocket team about it.
  • Bug with the back button when when drilling down into a website [Brian Pittman, Nexus 7 and Moto Triumph]  Fixed in Beta4
  • It would be nice to have a one tap action to open an article in the external browser instead of the current two tap action [Brian Pittman, Nexus 7 and Moto Triumph]  Fixed in 10b5
  • Full screen support [Nootish Han/Samsung Galaxy S2]
  • Continue to improve fonts [Mohamed Samir/ Galaxy SII] Added Soho and Roboto support to 10b5 (including Android 4.0.4)
  • Would like to use both feedly save and pocket save [Steve Edson]
  • As a feature, I would suggest improving the image viewing, to make reading online comics easier [Rui Pires, gt i9000] // Will be
  • thank you for adding in an option to long press to save for later reading but I think a shorter long press would be less awkward, it may just be me but I feel like I’m holding my screen forever [Cong Nguyen]
  • On the Transformer Prime tablet, when scrolling down through the left-hand navigation pane I noticed that the “Edit Content” feature would be activated, even when I did NOT select that [Gary Oppenhuis, Asus Transformer Prime] // Changed the touch sensitivity to take into account the touch slop in 10b5
  • Offline reading [Gary Oppenhuis, Asus Transformer Prime]
  • Edit mode confused me at first, because I had triggered it by long-pressing a topic without expanding its list of individual feeds. I just saw Edit floating at the top with no sign of what I could edit [Dylan McCall, Nexus 7] In Beta 4, the long touch on a category name on the selector will both open the selector and switch to edit mode.
  • That overflow menu doesn’t behave like any other menu, either in Android or (that I can see) in Feedly. When I tap something off of the menu, the thing I have tapped responds to my press and the menu does not close.  [Dylan McCall, Nexus 7]
  • While flipping through the Today section this morning, after maybe five minutes a bar appeared on the bottom saying “No network. Tap here to reload.” The problem is I _did_ have a perfectly good network connection (confirmed by opening an article and watching an image load), and clicking that bar dumped me all the way back to the beginning. [Dylan McCall, Nexus 7] // In 10b5, swiping a card will hide the no network sign
  • Create an option in the settings to “remove clutter” as a default. Navigating to a full post is a pain with most major sites. The ability to get a clean looking article is very nice. But since I always want that, I don’t think I should need to click that “remove clutter” icon each time [Mark Groves, Kindle Fire + JellyBean]
  • The video player could be improved. The “Ted” app it’s a great example of this (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ted.android). It follows the Android guidelines maintaining their style. There’s also a new API coming for YouTube videos to be embedded seamlessly in an app. Here’s the video session: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WFsx-u-q3Y [Seba Porta] Fixed in 10b5
  • Add an option to pull the full article from the site when the feed is truncated  [Seba Porta]
  • Would be nice if you use could get rid of the Android 2.0 style in Configuration, video player, etc. (at least in Android 4.0+). [Seba Porta]
  • Some pictures in articles aren’t centered or/and are rather small (see “National Geographic News” feed) [Seba Porta]
  • The App does not work correctly with lower DPIs set. I attached a screenshot with DPI set to 182 (default is 240). [Jan Bader, Galaxy S2]
  • Need a faster way to open the article in an external browser [Dave Feltham] Fixed in 10b5. From 2 touch to a single touch.
  • When reaching the end of the today section, it would be nice to have a swipe to refresh gesture [Kevin Drummond]

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Notes from the 500 startup #unsexy conference

Spent the day with Arthur at the 500-startup #unsexy conference. Some really great talks. Here are some notes.

Rashmi Sinha, CEO, Slideshare

  • Find one problem and focus on it
  • First useful, then social
  • Build opinionated software (slideshare = fast predictable experience for the viewer)
  • Do not depend on one platform (build an independent relationship with the user)
  • Don’t hire growth hackers, build a growth team.
  • Distribution hacks: be ahead of the curse
  • Biz Dev can be a time sink
  • Focus on your users, not your competition.

Really like the focus on doing one thing but doing it really really well and being opinionated (not just data driven).

Aaron Levie, CEO Box

  • Sales team reaches out to customer after product adoption. (Consumerization of IT)
  • Started as a consumer business and evolved into a business centric business when looking into monetization and growth
  • The cost structure – 40x cheaper to solve the same problem now than a few years ago
  • The enterprise is a lot more heterogeneous now (not microsoft only anymore).
  • Went through a tough time at the end of 2007. Combination of transition from consumer to the enterprise + fund raising.
  • Enterprise customers are ready to pay 100x more than consumers.

Aaron reminds me of Marc Andreessen in his early day.

Ben Chestnut, CEO MailChimp, @benchestnut

  • Bootstrapped, Profitable, started in 2001
  • Stop obsession about the competition (listen to yourself) – created a whiteboard of 100 customers.
  • Non traditional customer segmentation – tech savvy weirdos.
  • Embrace your audience.
  • Fight really really weird (Google Adwords vs. sending t-shirt and gifts, Open API)
  • Creativity is just connecting things. ALWAYS. BE. CREATING.
  • No project should take longer than 2 weeks.
  • We do not have a mobile department, we have a mobile lab.

Great design about MailChimp design philosophy. The service has a great personality around #creativity.

Hiten Shah, CEO KISSMetrics, about B2B distribution

  • Who are your customers?
  • How do you reach these customers?
  • How will your product help you grow?
  • “Are you friends already on facebook” fb hack
  • Channels get crowded fast ( // to mailchimp’s initial adword strategy).
  • “Drop Box storage reward for helping acquire you customer” is a good distribution hack.
  • 5 B2B distribution hacks: Instegrations, Work Emails, Embeds, Powered By,
  • Integration into other people’s platform (shopify, salesforce, box, 37signals,  yammer, ConstantContacts, github, mailchimp, google apps, freshbooks, Google Analytics, evernote, dropbox). Solve a problem for their customers. Showcase the use of their APIs.
  • Make your partner page awesome. Measure conversion and revenue
  • Ask users about integrations
  • Ask for work emails
  • Why should people embed (value to the user)? Track how embeds convert
  • Powered By is similar to embeds. Test the copy of your call to action. Measure the entire funnel

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Android / Hardware Acceleration / WebView

Here are some interesting resources if you are interested in looking under the hood at how Android offers hardware acceleration.

Google I/O: For Butter or Worse: Smoothing Out Performance in Android UIs
A great overview of the different rendering models offered by Android. Lots of innovation coming in Jelly Bean.

Google I/O 2012: What’s New in Android Developer Tools
Demo of various tools you can use to profile and debug Android Apps.

Google I/O 2012 – Android WebView
Great presentation on the inner workings of the Android WebView. A great resource if you are looking at polishing HTML5 apps on Android.

Let me know if you know of other resources we should add to this list.

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Polishing rough edges – Patch 1

On tuesday, we pushed out the first beta of feedly 10 desktop. We received a lot of feedback and suggestions on Facebook, twitter and get satisfaction (thanks!). Today, we are pushing out a patch (build 10.0.431) which addresses some of the most pressing issues:

  • FIXED – Uncategorized is not accessible.
  • FIXED – Use a sans-serif font for the title only view.
  • FIXED – Add preference to allow users to customize header fonts.
  • FIXED – Clipping at the bottom of titles in title only view.
  • FIXED – Trying to click on the + sign to add a new feed in the search panel generates a loading loop.
  • FIXED – Index page spacing is broken.
  • FIXED – Allow users to make index their start page.
  • FIXED – Once inlined, the techcrunch image looks tiny!
  • FIXED – When using entire inlined articles, the read/unread color is not working.
  • FIXED – Ability to login to feedly account in Firefox/Aurora.
  • FIXED – Access to scrollbar on Chrome, Firefox and Safari. FIXED
  • FIXED – Link started kit header to matching explore page.
  • FIXED – remove tumblr option until we finish v1 to v2 API migration
  • FIXED – add twitter and facebook to the explore panel
  • FIXED – feed popup is missing a string resource m.496 (???)
  • FIXED – Customize button next to source title does not work in the category pages
  • FIXED – Featured articles should be fresher. Ideally same day articles.
  • FIXED – Explain feedly concept during unpacking experience.
  • FIXED – “unread only” not checked is not honored on category pages
  • FIXED – External links with embedded amp are broken
  • FIXED – Allow users to try to reconnect when feedly looses it network connection

We pushed 10.0.431 out to all feedly xt users. If no P0 issues are reported tonight, we will push the update to all feedly app users, safari users and submit the app to mozilla for review tomorrow.

We will most likely push another patch out at the end of next week so if there are other things you would like to see fixed, please post a comment or send us an email via care@feedly.com

Thanks for the feedback and suggestions <3

Updated on June 2nd: Feedly+Firefox 10.0 submitted to Mozilla for review. You can get the early access on the Mozilla Store: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/feedly/versions/?page=1#version-10.0 Have a great week end!

Updated on June 4th, 2012: We pushed out 10.0.432. Fixes the search regression. Re-introduces the jump to next button.

Updated on June 8th, 2012: We pushed out 10.1.435. Fixes issue where non-subscribed explore articles were sometimes shown in the featured section of today. Added back the explicit Add Website option. Fixed a few other pixels here and there.

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