Sometimes, doing GUI mockups is just too much fun, really.
Today I was inspired by this new project to think about feed reader UIs again. Over the years I have used a lot of different apps for reading feeds: Straw, Liferea, Blam, some Firefox browser extensions, Liferea again, Google Reader and finally Evolution-RSS. There are about half a million more, but none of them seems to really satisfy my needs (or… expectations). So, what does the perfect feed reader need? For me:
- it has to be simple (not full of features like Lifera)
- it has to be able to render content correctly (read: no gtkhtml)
- it needs to way to categorize feeds (folders or even better: tags)
- it should be able to run minimized and notify me if new feed items are available
- it should have a pleasant look and feel
Maybe Summa will be “the” feed reader for me at some point in the future. Perhaps it will even look similar to this:
I know, some will hate the mockup but for me, a reader like that would be about perfect. Here’s a sample menu layout as well 🙂 :
(Note: some of the icons used here are based on some concept art done by hbons)