Do you ever read a news story or a blog post in your RSS reader and wonder what other readers think about it? You can visit the web page and see what comments it has got. You can go to news ranking sites like Digg/Reddit and read the comments. You can peek into FriendFeed to see what people have to say about this story. But imagine doing that from a 320x480 screen of your android phone. ReaderScope v1.1 tries to make this social interaction easy for you with Social Beacons.
When you start reading a news item, ReaderScope scans Digg, Reddit, FriendFeed (silently in background) to check if they have this story listed. If it finds them, it will indicate respective beacon icons in the lower right hand corner of the news. If you like, you can tap on them and check the popularity scores and comments from these sites. You don't need to have any account with these services to use this feature (unless you want to rank the story or post a comment).
Of course if you don't bother about the social buzz of a news item, you can turn this feature off. Social Beacons are similar to action controls, you can uncheck them by going to Settings -> Action Controls.
If you like to use beacons only when you have right network or sufficient battery, you can set that too, under Settings -> Smart Settings.
This release also adds the functionality to read news by labels/tags - something requested by many. As a matter of fact, the functionality was always there. If you used any of beta versions, you would know. In 1.0, I moved to a hierarchical structure for feed list, that put a limitation on accessing news by labels. In this release however I found a way to get it working. Check out yourself.
There were also some improvements to avoid some memory leaks (reference leaks to be precise).
So give it a try!
3 comments:
Is there zoom or any other way to make text display larger? What about hiding the already read stuff?
That's the stuff I like on Newsrob and miss on ReaderScope.
Nelson, both are good suggestions. Noted in my todo list.
Thanks.
If you can, make it non intrusive. I don't like how in newsrob the zoom controls keep popping up when I drag the text. There is always the trackball of course, but it's not as fluid as dragging. Can something be done about that as well?
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