Reinventing the interface

[firecat]

http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2009/05/05/RSSReadersModeledAfterEmailClientsAreFundamentallyBroken.aspx

Looking back at the time I’ve spent working on RSS Bandit, I realize there are a couple of features I added to attempt to glom the river of news model on top of an email based model for reading feeds. These features include

* the ability to mark all items as read after navigating away from a feed. This allows you to skim the interesting headlines then not have to deal with the “guilt” of not reading the rest of the items in the feed.
* a reading pane inspired by Google Reader where unread items are presented in a single flow and marked as read as you scroll past each item

Gosh, that sounds just like Usenet.