garry’s subposthaven

Feedly is a thing of beauty. Really, it's great. Here's what it looks like. I'm impressed that it syncs with Google Reader out of the box. The install process is a snap.

Visually it is beautiful. Here's the thing I really want it to do though: I want it to let me see lots and lots of content very fast. Google Reader does a decent job of this already with the inline post views. Just press space and keep scanning -- hundreds of post consumed in minutes. Its not pretty but it does the job.

Feedly reminds me of going to a bookstore and poking around. Everything is pretty, shiny, and new. I really appreciate the attention to information design. But on the interaction side, I don't want to give up the ability to scan fast, ideally using minimal mouse interaction. The inline modals don't feel quite natural, and for an uninitiated user can be unexpected.

EDIT: Super awesome commenter below mentions that pressing ? gives you keyboard shortcuts. This is pretty epic and satisfies my need for fast keyboard navigation. Just press j and it'll inline the next story immediately. Man, that's nice. 

The other thing I would love is more media-specific views of things. Of course, thats not the easiest thing in the world, but could certainly be powerful.  I didn't play with this enough when I first wrote this. I love the media-specific views for video, photos, etc. I find it weird that they are buried in the middle of the homepage. While I like pages that show me lots of cool stuff, I somehow expect these views to be top-level navigable, not interspersed without context.  

Been thinking a lot about how to consume feeds -- The My Subscriptions view on Posterous could use some love and I think there is a lot of amazing stuff that we can't wait to build. I can't tell you how lucky we feel to wake up in the morning and know that we can build new cool stuff that both we and our users will use.

It's very hard to design something that works incredibly well and is beautiful at once. But when you do, there can be nothing like it. Feedly, you are so beautiful, and with a little bit of tweaking, I think you can be the beautiful unique snowflake that you deserve to be. Thanks for the inspiration, too.