Collector for Windows Phone (Flipboard alternative)

[ozahran]

I'd love to see on one side the latest headline with a photo (like the Win 8 News app) and on the flip/back side of the tile maybe the next three latest headlines and last updated timestamp.

That would be amazing

 

[Nicholas Valbusa]

What I'd love to see implemented on this app is an attractive live tile. I haven't really found any news app on WP yet that displays news headlines on a live tile effectively.

On Windows 8/RT, the built in News app and the Sky News app have excellent live tiles. Something like that would work nicely.

I'd love to see on one side the latest headline with a photo (like the Win 8 News app) and on the flip/back side of the tile maybe the next three latest headlines and last updated timestamp.

Thanks for the idea! I'll add it to the "next ideas to be discussed" meeting ;-)

 

[Nicholas Valbusa]

Quick update: the version 1.3 is now live on the Marketplace!

Changelog:
[v1.3]
- New redesigned home screen
- Facebook integration
- Share via email
- Tens of improvements and fixes
- Better quality for the articles images

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Today, Twitter made some changes to the "Connect with Twitter" APIs (OAuth). Lot of developers already blamed Twitter because a huge number of apps are now broken.
Collector is suffering from this issue: the Connect with Twitter feature makes the app crash. If you were logged in before yesterday, this issue doesn't affect you but only users that login.
This evening we'll submit an update to Microsoft, with a fix for the issue.

 

[blnwp]

I don't see v1.3 yet in US Marketplace. May be it's still propagating to all regions.

Also, would like to add few things I noticed in v1.2. Probably they are fixed in v1.3. Believe, I'm the most frequent complainer here and sorry about that.

- Resuming an app loses the position of the article and goes back to top. Would be great if it can go back to the same position.
- Videos does not fit to width. Would be nice if they fit to the width and at least YouTube and HTML5 videos are playable.
- As like someone said before here, I would like to directly go into the "read article" mode from the collection and all the buttons in the intermediate view can be moved to a translucent bottom bar. When hitting back button, it should bring back to the collection. Pretty much, the intermediate view is unnecessary in my opinion.
- I'm not sure whether you've noticed or not but all articles open with alignment little off center to the right instead of being exact center aligned. This really drives me nuts and I manually adjust it before reading. May be I'm weird or something.

Great effort!! Thanks.

 

[ally42]

Love this App. Bought it to show my support. You guys are quick at fixing things and updating. Good job.

 

[Al_2]

- As like someone said before here, I would like to directly go into the "read article" mode from the collection and all the buttons in the intermediate view can be moved to a translucent bottom bar. When hitting back button, it should bring back to the collection. Pretty much, the intermediate view is unnecessary in my opinion.

This would be great. Please do this

 

[KQ17]

Got the update today. Great job.

 

[Al_2]

Quick update: the version 1.3 is now live on the Marketplace!

Changelog:
[v1.3]
- New redesigned home screen

This is great! Please also lay the individual collections out like this

 

[ally42]

Thanks for the idea! I'll add it to the "next ideas to be discussed" meeting ;-)

** yes add thAt. That'd awesome !

 

[blnwp]

Congrats on being featured in the homepage of the 'apps' section in the marketplace(US). That should bring some visibility to your app.

 

[brunok]

A few suggestions:

• Some feeds/articles have low image resolution. An option to either suppress low res images or to show them in a proper size would be very nice. Currently, these images show up in the home screen and in articles headers and they look very ugly. It's a minor problem but it really bugs me.
• Someone suggested a few changes to Intermediate view above, that would be awesome.
• Full article view is a lot uglier, fonts and layout are weird... again, a minor issue.

 

[ally42]

[*]Full article view is a lot uglier, fonts and layout are weird... again, a minor issue.[/LIST]

I agree, full article view is not as stylish as the rest of the app. Maybe a change of the font would do it good.

 

[Al_2]

I agree, full article view is not as stylish as the rest of the app. Maybe a change of the font would do it good.

The main article view definitely isn't as stylish as the rest of the app. It's partly the font and also the way it's spaced out I think.

Here's how I think you could improve it:

1. Put the image right at the top and make it span the full width of the screen.
2. Align the main body of text so it's in the centre (currently the left margin is bigger than the right)
3. When you scroll down the article can move from left to right...it'd be better if it didn't do that
4. Change the font to Segoe UI
5. Add the Share and Open in browser buttons at the bottom.

The USA Today app does it very nicely:

Collector:


USA Today:


On another point, why doesn't the news automatically refresh when you open the app? You have to hit refresh which is a bit annoying...

 

[blnwp]

On another point, why doesn't the news automatically refresh when you open the app? You have to hit refresh which is a bit annoying...

Auto refresh can be configured from settings for each collection but not for all the collections. Once enabled, it will refresh (an indication would be better) the collection. You can notice this behavior by seeing that refresh button is disabled if it's auto updating.

 

[mangoose]

Hi Nicholas,

I recently bought your app. Its awesome. Great work!

I'd just add that there are couple of things you could do to improve:

1. On sites like 'The Verge', half article is posted with note 'Developing'. But even when the full article is posted, the Read article shows only that half article.

2. Please include a night mode. AMOLEDs tend to burn eyes in low light, specially with white background. What I'd recommend is to add a mode that reads the phone time and at 7pm (the user specified night time), starts toning down the articles background and text brightness. Note: Gray text on black looks more awesome than white text on gray or navy blue. (You can also make a slider control for this)

3. Please show the full article when an article is touched upon.. i.e. kill the 'Read Article' from article options. When a new article is clicked upon, you can start loading the rest of the article. In that case, you can compare the two text and replace it from the point it the article differs. Usually, the replacing point is ".... (continue reading)". Replace this with the rest of the article.

4. Please add an 'Open Media' or 'Open Video' button in the article options. This would enable watching any video attached to the article.

Also, Al_2 has posted excellent points above for formatting.

 

[DutchmanIII]

Nicholas, I've sent you a pm. let me know if you're still interested in the translation.

 

[Nicholas Valbusa]

Hi,

Thanks for all your feedback, especially on the "read article" page.
We'll definitely redesign that soon!

Right now we're on holidays in Japan till the 22th. We're resume our normal work from the 23th.

Oh, the 1.4 should be available on the marketplace with some improvements, Twitter fix and Instagram support.

Cheers!

 

[nizzon]

Nice with Instagram support! I hope commenting will be possbile?

 

[KQ17]

Any news?

 

[Nicholas Valbusa]

Hi guys,

we recently released update 1.4.1 which fixes few issues with the app crashing randomly during the use.


WHAT IS COMING SOON:
v1.4.2 (coming the first week of May)
- More bugfixes for random crashes
- Read/unread articles

Other planned features to be included in the next releases
- Pocket (read it later) integration
- Starred articles
- Share via SMS
- Signup/login to save your collections
- 720p resolution support (HTC 8X)
- New re-designed article view page with horizontal swipe between articles (prev/next)