EDIT: Finally found where I had saved the screenshots, no more broken images :P Also I wrote this long ago, since then I gave up on the default rss reader and started using Google Reader.
Let me start by saying this: The rss reader in the s60 browser isn’t useful, but it has potential.Now that I got your attention, let me explain why I think that, in this post I’ll use one of my favorite tech blogs to test, engadget, let’s see howthe engadget feed looks like in the rss reader:
Not very useful right? lol
This the two mistakes S60 browser team made in designing the rss reader:
- Huge font
- Huge images
The first thing can be solved by a hack made by the symbian freaks at symbian-freak.com.
This changes the reader template to adjust the fonts sizes, let’s see how engadget looks on this modified reader:
Still huge images but a sensible text size, much more easy to read.
But how to solve it? Does some kind of special resize image function need to be created? No, this is already built in s60’s browser core, look at this screenshot I took of the main engadget page set to 50% zoom:
Sensible pic size, excellent text size (a matter of opinion, I understand that some users may think of this as too small), really much more information fits in the screen at the same time. I should just go to the page instead of using rss, right? Wrong, if I do this, every time I wish to check the news I would have to load the whole page, including the thousend ad gifs and swfs that engadget have.
So a simple solution would be let users set their favorite zoom level at the rss readers preferences, but a much more handy solution would be make a “special algorithm ” or something like that to automatically resize the picture, while letting the user select the text size he wants.
That ends my rant on the rendering of rss feed contents, but you think this post’s over? Oh no sir. :P
Other things that annoy me, and keep me from using the default rss reader as my main rss reader are the following:
- Mark all as read
If I’m busy all day long, and couldn’t refresh my rss reader, but have read some more important itens in my browser, the next time I refresh it it may have up to 40 non-read items, in engadget’s case. But as I already saw the important news one way or another, I don’t want to read all the 40 items again, a mark all read option would be really useful here.
- Unread items in the “Web Feeds folder”
I made a mockup of how I would like this implemented:
The number is how many unread items you have at all. Why is this useful? Well, look at my feed list:
The red arrow is pointing to the scroll bar, indicating there’s more feeds down of those that are shown. You can’t see if there are more unread items unless you scroll down, which is kind of a waste of time if there aren’t unread items. So that is where the unread items count would come handy.
And that’s all it would take to make the rss reader of my dreams lol.
S60 really encourages the use of rss, all the blogs have separate rss feeds and there is a big one with all the posts. Rss is often mentioned as the future of news delivering and S60 should polish more the interface of their reader, as even some posts in the s60 blogs have pictures to big to be comfortably viewed in the reader.
And I know that this isn’t going to happen, but if ever they make those changes to the rss reader, I would like there to be a separate .sis package so I could update the reader in my phone :3
This post was made with a V12 N95 using the dots mocha theme from Nokia.
This is not a bashing post towards S60 browser team, they made a insanely great job with the browser, you should read this more as sugestions than anything else.
I would also like to apologize for the eventual english mistake.
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