PulpFiction and attention management
Saturday, September 24, 2005 at 7:07 PulpFiction was awarded an 8 out of 10 rating by Ars Technica. Here's what I think, Don and Erik*. As much as I agree with you both on the "I need to manage my news articles" vs. "I need to manage my feeds" point, I think it would help enourmously if you would let your users organize their feeds as well. One of the reasons I still don't use PulpFiction (even though I bought it more than a year ago) is because Smart Folders are just not smart enough for me.
It would be ideal if I could organize my feeds myself and then let the feedreader organize the articles for me automatically. Like SearchFox but locally. (In fact, I would love to see SearchFox provide an API for developers to utilize, but that's a separate topic.)
* Erik, my apologies for misspelling your name!
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Reader Comments (4)
George, unfortunately, "they're not smart enough" is hardly a bug report a developer can use. Not smart enough how?
My name is Erik. Not sure who you mean when you keep talking about this Eric fellow.
Ouch! Erik, sorry for misspelling your name! I used to have a colleague named Eric and it must have put me out...
"Smarter" folders will require a lot more metadata than feeds normaly provide on their own. At the very least, I'd like to be able to organize the feeds—put them in separate folders (that's what I have right now) or better yet—tag them (that's what I'd LOVE to have!). This along will allow me to create better smart folders.
Also, why not expose more of what we do have in the feeds? Like 1) date article posted, 2) date modified, 3) enclosure type, 4) feed type (I know I am getting too excited here, but why not?), 5) geotag fields, 6) other RSS-extensions' fields, etc.
Another way to get more metadata is to derive it from the reader's habits—how much time s/he spends reading any particular article, what's being flagged, what's being deleted, what others find interesting (this will require some sort of web-service, obviously), and so on.
Your "remember me" stuff appears to be broken. You may want to look into that.
"Tags" exist. They're called "labels" and they can - or optionally cannot - actually use a color. You can also turn the color off.
Now, on to the rest:
Date posted and date modified - around 40% of feeds and articles don't post the proper dates and most don't post the proper times. Until that situation changes, there's little a "date posted" flag will find. Furthermore, you can sort (with the column headers) by date posted, which allows you to change your viewing preference from "today" to "the past three days" without changing any settings. Just scroll further to expand (or shrink) your range.
Enclosures were a bit of a rush, and support for them will be expanded. As it stands, "download" is fine if you have any ability to AppleScript the results. Put all enclosures in a folder and use an AppleScript to put the JPEGs somewhere, the .mp3s somewhere else, the .movs somewhere, and so forth.
Geotag? "Other" stuff? This isn't used nearly as often as you'd like to think. About 2% of feeds have geotag fields, and the number has been steadily decreasing. As a software developer, you have to spend time fixing problems and enhancing situations that bring about joy and productivity to the greatest amount of people. 2% or less is, by definition, a low-priority issue.
Send your thoughts in an email to Don and I'm sure he'll have more to say.
I thought about this all for a few days and I think I'd personally be fine with pretty much everything else if PF could preserve the groups from my subscriptions OPML file. Perhaps, by assigning the appropriate labels to feeds.