I think the preference panels needs to be cleaned up. I do not want to take away any features! (I know you are very fond of all of them, Andrew.) However I think a compromise for everything would be to define a couple of user experiences the user can select from. Further the user could then open an advanced preference view were she could set all options individually.
The core of this is that I personally want to push the development in a more functional and minimalistic direction; while Andrew wants to keep all his bells and whistles. Both ways can work for the individual user. A minimalistic approach is perfect for users who just want to ‘get the news’, and for advanced users who like to republish news in a feed (aggregator style) more bells would prove prudent.
How do we attcheive this? By defining two or more workflows/interfaces with different user interactions; that the user could tweak future based on their individual preferences.
Suggestions for workflows (something to begin with):
- Newspaper-style, every item from every feed displayed as with combined view sorted chronologically. No bells other than a ‘mark as read’ button for each item. And not even a list of feeds. A search bar would probably be good too. This workflow would suite users with very few feeds and very feed needs. :-)
- Newshutch-style, a very similar approach to how things work in my bellowed Newshutch. <3 With item starring, and with a big fat ‘mark all as read and open next’ button. This workflow would suite users with a bunch of feeds who mostly scans trough a bunch of feeds quickly, and stops only to read on when something interesting shows up.
- Publisher-style, as above but with publishing tools.
- Advanced-style, would suite users with a whole lot of time and not too many feeds to crawl trough at a good passe.
Of course these workflow templates needs work. :-)
To sum up what needs to be done:
- Create two or more set of preferences.
- Create an interface/option in the preference view for selecting a workflow.
- Create an advanced preference view (which would appear much as the preference view looks today) for tweaking the different workflows. When tweaked the workflow should be called ‘Workflow-name (Costume)’ in the preference view's workflow selector to indicate that it has been modified from the workflow's default options.
Now how about that, Andrew? :-D
