What are your thoughts on the front-end rewrite that's now on dev.newsblur.com?

Hey NewsBlurites, I just pushed an enormous rewrite of the front-end out to dev.newsblur.com. If you’re not already on dev, you’re missing out on the future of NewsBlur: shared stories and blurblogs.

For those of you on dev, please let me know if anything seems faster, slower, broken, or wonky. I’m going to be taking all of your input and working on it all week. The hope is that within a week I’ll be able to launch social and have it hit production. I’m mulling over a redesign of the dashboard to coincide with the relaunch of NewsBlur.

I’ll also be hitting up a few tech blogs and letting them know. If you have any contacts at news orgs, email me: samuel@newsblur.com. I’m looking to launch soon.

Now, give me all the feedback you can!

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So far, in about 30 minutes using it, I haven’t noticed any differences. So great job! Backbone ftw.

Actually, I lied: on iPad, the “fetching stories” progress bar is in the right place now - It used to be off by ~50px.

Ohh, iPad user, huh? You’ll love what’s happening here: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlu…. Pretty soon I’ll add a “via iPad” to comments and replies, and then get ready to be jealous since there are only 2 iPads that have the NewsBlur iPad app. If you have Xcode, you can reasonably easily make your iPad the third one with the app.

Previously when scrolling through the Everything button, articles would show up slowly and most of the time I would just have to click it again to load new articles as it would just give up loading them sometimes.

Now its all buttery smooth and perfect! I couldn’t be happier!

The animation when I press “n” to go to the next unread story in feed view makes me dizzy. Please allow for it to be disabled.

Other that that it feels faster and smoother indeed. Good job!

Of course you can disable it. Manage > Preferences > Animations.

Well, it doesn’t seem to work. I checked now and indeed, the Animations setting was set to “Jump immediately”. I tried to reset the setting by setting it to “Show all” -> Save and then back to “Jump immediately”, but it didn’t made any difference. (Using Firefox 10.0.2).

The “Collapse folder” button shows “+” when I open dev.newsblur.com and I have the folder already opened/expanded (it should display a “-”). And when the folder is collapsed, the tooltip should say something like “Expand folder” (now it says “Collapse folder” eitherway).

I’ve found performance to be greatly improved. The feeds definitely load posts faster and it gives the system a much more responsive feel, so great job there.

I’m not sure if this is a result of posts loading faster, but when I am scrolling downward through a list of posts, my scroll spot jumps all over the place and my eyes lose the point that I was reading. I think it would classify into your wonky category. That was probably a horrible description of what I am experiencing, but I tried. This isn’t a huge complaint, but if the scrolling was smoother and didn’t jump as newer posts get loaded, it would make the system that much better to use.

So far its awesome… Although I’m having a problem removing a feed… It’s gone, until I reload.

Seems pretty darn speedy so far! I’m glad you fixed the jumping feed listing, too - that adds about a jillion points of positive UX for me.

Looks like the Single-story Feed View option isn’t working, though. No matter what it’s set at, it shows all stories in the reading pane.
Like Adrian, I’m getting the same with the animation preference. It doesn’t matter what it’s set to, the animations want to happen. Badly.

Found another issue, using Chrome and Firefox.

When an article is selected, resizing the window (and therefore the reading pane) wipes out the reading pane until the view is refreshed (clicking on another feed, going to the dashboard, F5ing).

Doesn’t happen when I go to the feed and select nothing and then resize.

Same thing happens in IE with Chrome frame. If I open an “InPrivate” window to test without Chrome Frame, it doesn’t happen, but there are a whole host of other issues that then occur.

Ohhh, exciting. I’m about to head out of town, but maybe I’ll ping you next weekend for a little more info about creating the app package with xcode. Can’t wait to check it out!

When I scroll down with the mousewheel at the top of a story, the story above it will get marked as read. (Yes, I read in reverse order.) This means I can’t use ‘m’ to move to the next unread story. This happens in both Firefox 13.0 and Chrome 19.0.1084.6.

Fixed the following issues:

  • Animation preferences
  • Mark story as read delay
  • Showing a single story at a time in the Feed view
  • Inadvertently selecting the wrong story (due to the mouse cursor being on top of another story while using the keyboard)

See the commit here: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlu…

Thanks Samuel, new version works much faster on my old pc (2,6ghz and 480mb ram). I use Cranchbang + Iceweasel 12.

Indeed, the animations issue is resolved.

Here’s what’s left from my point of view:

  • the plus sign on the folder
  • the unread items in the folder view don’t correspond to the unread items in the story/feed view
  • the list of stories gets behind the actual story displayed on folder view and doesn’t get updated with the story being viewed
  • the performance when viewing folders with hundreds of stories hasn’t improved on Firefox
  • I still have to check if I can view the duplicates in a folder view (like described on Can’t advance when having two consecutive exactly the same stories

Stuck on the “Stay tuned…” screen. Using Chrome.

What screen is that?

I found issue:
removed site stay on the list after relolad.