Voyage: Charting RSS Feeds For Easy Reading
Let’s face it, whether you’re flipping through papers, running through the channels, or even scrolling through a basic RSS feeder to get your news, it’s not much fun. Voyage, the RSS feed reader that puts feeds into a three dimensional grid may just change the way you feel about your news reading.
When you start with Voyage the first thing you see is the design sense that makes reading so much easier. On a smoke gray background Voyage suspends headlines in chronological order. A thin orange line divides the screen letting you know the median time of the stories you see. Headlines are stacked in layers, with the older stories appearing muted and fading into the distance. Clicking on any of them brings the story to the front, and if you click on the older of the stories, you will see more of the older stories, stacked and fading into the gray.
It’s the navigation that makes Voyage fun. As you move your mouse Voyage reacts, letting you bring the stories you care about closer to you. Since older stories are stacked and faded in relation to their age, there is a 3d effect of scrolling through the news. Remember how the machine in Minority Report looked? It feels a little like that, with users able to open and move the news in a 3d space. Whenever you want to zoom out - to see the most recent news - you can use the arrow keys and Voyage will put you back at the current hour. Any time you want to see a story, just click either the headline or the plus sign and the story will expand for a synopsis view. If you want greater detail, you can follow the link to the source.
Managing feeds is equally simple, with a click on the “Manage my RSS feeds” link on the bottom of the screen a box will open showing your feeds. Each feed has a color which you can see in the link and plus sign in the news feeds, and in the management box, an easy one click delete. Adding feeds is as easy as clicking on the “Add my feeds” link in the management box.
The difficulty with Voyage is that it was not designed for heavy users. Too many feeds tend to make the interface too difficult to read, and there is no way to group feeds. That said, for a simple RSS reader, Voyage is fun to navigate and user friendly. To find Voyage, or other readers like it there is the Listio search: RSS+manage.
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Tags: feeds, manage, news, read, rss
Posted in: RSS Reader | Respond
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