Has anyone tried the Newsblur app on an Android-based e-ink device like the PocketBook? How well did it work?
I believe there’s no way to disable animations, so it might not work that well.
If anybody else is interested in eink reading please let me know! I’d be happy to see about removing animations as an option to better support this workflow.
Have you used something like ktool.io to send individual stories?
I personally haven’t tried that since it seems to be only for Kindle. But there are other services for converting articles to e-reader formats, e.g. dotepub which I haven’t tried either 
I usually use Pocket for this, that exists in Kobo e-readers and would also be available on PocketBook.
But one of the real advantage of something like a PocketBook device or other Android readers would be that it’s a more or less open ecosystem so you can directly use the Newsblur app and any e-reading apps (Kindle, Kobo, PocketBook, etc.).
Those usually have an option to disable animations, except for Kindle (predictably). But in the case of PocketBook, the device developers added a hack that detects if Kindle is running and strips out the animations. I don’t have the device yet since I’m still considering some others, otherwise I could test if the Kindle hack triggers for Newsblur as well.
I’m working on a new eink-based reading project and would love to know more of your use cases for reading on eink over a screen. What do you look for in eink versus the screen? Think NewsBlur-level interaction but for eink, what would be completely different and what would be the same?
Help me flesh that out and in about a year’s time I’ll have some new hardware to show you that accomplishes reading long and short form content in a completely new way.
Oh, that sounds very intriguing! My use case is more or less:
- Reading industry news outside in broad sunlight.
- Generally the items would be long form, the length of a newspaper article.
- The formatting should be uniform and include the whole text (think Newsblur full text view, Firefox Reader View, Pocket, etc.)
- Generally not heavy on pictures. But reading the odd webcomic between heavy articles could be fun.
- Ideally an offline mode would keep the full article text on the device. The goal is precisely not to be indoors with wi-fi.
- When coming back online, the read state would be synced with Newsblur.
- Big bonus points if the reading position/scroll position is synced as well.
- Sending extra article URLs to the service as a one-off for interesting things that didn’t originate on a feed. Somewhat similar to newsletters in Newsblur.
Pocket does much of this, but on e-ink it’s a Kobo exclusive as far as I know. And getting articles into Pocket is an extra step if most of your reading comes from feeds anyway. A potential Newsblur-on-e-ink would solve this for me by combining all those features.
What do other people think?
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Hey Sam - just following-up on this post. I just got a Onyx Boox Leaf 2 today, and Newsblur was the first app I downloaded. A couple of minor changes will help optimise the experience for the ereader:
- The leaf has buttons on the side that are passed on as volume changes to the app. I can see that the Android app already has an option to go to the next article through volume buttons. If an option can be added to ‘scroll’ a page through volume buttons, this could give the app pagination without a lot of work.
- Removing animations overall, but especially while scrolling (so the next ‘page’ just shows up) will really improve it.
Happy to provide any other feedback as well!
Note that disabling animations OS-wide in com.android.settings might work, depending upon how they’ve been implemented.
Here’s the preview of the new reading device I’m building. We’re entering production and it will be available by Christmas!
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