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)