Collector for Windows Phone (Flipboard alternative)

[Nicholas Valbusa]

Hello everyone,

I am pleased to announce Collector, a news reading app that we released last night for Windows Phone 7 and 8.



Our main goal was to have something that worked like Flipboard for iOS/Android, and I can say that we probably did it. rly:

All our team we'll be happy to read your feedbacks, so please take a look at it and let us know your thoughts!

You can download the app by visiting this link on your device collectorwp.com or just browse the marketplace.


“Collector is simply the best news reader on the market.”

Browse through and choose from a selection of hundreds of feeds, or better still add your own RSS feed!

We care about quality.That is why we made it our life’s mission to bring you pixel perfect craftmanship the app, making your reading experience the best it can possibly be!

Collector works on ANY Windows Phone device out there, and does what the other readers cant and dont; it works offline as well !

You can also connect to Twitter in order to create your very own personalised news feeds from any of your Twitter followers. Prefer Tumblr, well that ‘s supported too.
Thanks to Collector Content Scraping, you can automatically see any link or attached picture, much like an Instagram photo or an article from a website.

Main features:
- Browse between a hundred of selected news websites or magazines.
- Add your own RSS feeds.
- Read articles offline, or read them while it’s syncing.
- Integrated Readability? content reading.
- Share directly to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn !
- Create news feeds using other sources, like a Twitter user or even a Tumblr blog
- Live tiles supports every Windows Phone version (7.8 too!)

UPDATE 1.2:
- RSS Feed search engine
- Background agent to update live tiles
- Italian localization
- Number of articles to check
- Improved article content (spaces and typography)
- Share articles via email
- Brand new pin-icons, hand-made designed for each category
- Few UI/UX improvements
- Bugfix for some crashes reported by few users

UPDATE 1.3:
- New redesigned home screen
- Facebook integration
- Share via email
- Tens of improvements and fixes
- Better quality for the articles images

UPDATE 1.4 and 1.4.1:
- Instagram integration
- Bugfix for random crashes at startup
- Automatic download of outdated collections
- Improved download speed for the collections
- Little graphical improvements

UPDATE 1.5.1
- Bugfix for random crashes at startup
- Import feeds from Google Reader
- Unread/read articles
- Fix for low-quality images in some feeds
- Little improvements

UPDATE 1.5.2
- New re-designed "Read article page"
- Article detail page removed
- Few little fixes and general stability improvements

UPDATE 1.6
- New signup/login feature
- Background cloud-sync of collections and preferences (if you're logged in)
- 32bit color depth support for Windows Phone 7.x devices
- Improved stability while loading some feeds

UPDATE 1.6.1
- New Light/Dark reading theme
- Improved stability while reading the articles
- Infinite scrolling changed to pages (memory friendly)
- Pin icons and some new welcome screens
- Little improvements around the app

UPDATE 1.6.2
- Pocket (Read it later) integration
- General stability improvements
- Added an option to skip the welcome screen
- New collections update engine

UPDATE 1.6.3
- Improved readability on articles
- Bugfixes

Download Collector for Windows Phone

Like us on Facebook! facebook.com/collectorwp

With Love
Collector Team

 

[MsbS]

Nice! Add a browser viewer for the desktop, and you'll get a crowd of Google Reader converts (myself included)!

 

[danjah]

Superb! Threw away Weave the second Collector was out. It quite simply rocks.. Thanks!

 

[theefman]

Needs better formatting on some sites when using the built in viewer e.g. the BET articles look poor, and the ability to detect a feed from a website name. Ana Windows 8 version that syncs with the WP version.

 

[m4tthall]

Great start, haven't played around with it too much yet but looks very professional. It would be nice to have the scrolling between articles a little more defined so I don't have to stop the scroll. Something like the flip in flipboard or the way it auto stops on each article in AppFlow. That is just my personal preference though, others may not agree. For twitter it would be really useful to be able to pin hashtags as well as users. Finally, it would be nice to be able to select smaller text. One I use it a bit more I am sure I will have some more thoughts Good stuff though, I look forward to seeing how this develops, off to purchase now...

 

[m4tthall]

Oh, and it would be nice to have some kind of graphic showing when spinning the hamster is happening

 

[m4tthall]

Ah, just got to bottom of twitter feed and it doesn't load any more articles, is it supposed to do that? If so, could I suggest you add the ability to keep loading older tweets each time you get to the bottom please?

 

[Nick Garza]

From just glancing at the screenshots, I didn't think I would like it that much. But I was pleasantly surprised. It ran pretty smoothly, which I didn't expect, and the UI grew on me. Not a fan of the theme-colored bar along the top, and it would be nice if there was an option to hide the bottom menu ( prefer a more minimalist look, or something like the USAtoday app/tile ), but other than that, its great. Buying it, give it a run instead of weave for a while.

Oh, and it seems that it is rotation locked, which is freaking awesome.

 

[m4tthall]

Something else, is there any way to visually show articles that have already been read? And/or a counter somewhere to show how many new items there are?

 

[Nicholas Valbusa]

Hi guys,

thanks for all your feedbacks, we are very happy to read your thoughts.

There are a lot of planned features to be implemented, such as read/unread/starred articles, support for old articles and a lot of other nice things.
You can stay updated with our development following us on Twitter here https://twitter.com/collectorwp or just looking at the "about & news" page of the app (it's on the bottom bar in the main screen).

We'll do our best to satisfy all our users, promised.

A little update has already been sent to Microsoft, and we expect to release a bunch of features before the end of March.

Nicholas
Collector team

 

[AresNebola]

It is possible to add an option for downloading the full-article directly (instead of the summary) ?

Thanks

 

[rangu]

I like newser a lot. Just a summary of news

 

[rockstarzzz]

Most articles render pixelated images. Some how Weave has solved that in their versions.

 

[Nicholas Valbusa]

We are working on an improved engine to always get high-resolution images (if available), and to get the full content of the news instead of the summary. Will keep you updated

 

[chadwick611]

cool going to check it out~!

 

[Jazmac]

Awesome dude. I like Flipboard but I don't even care for it being an "alternative". Just be good at what it supposed to do and I'll forget about Flipboard. So far, it looks real good Nic. Smooth as glass. Still putting it through its paces but its real nice man. Thanks.

 

[TonyDedrick]

Just tried and probably as close to Flipboard as I have seen aesthetics wise on WP. Great job so far.

Just one question. I noticed some of the pics came through very grainy. I don't know if its on my end and I just have a bad connection or maybe I have to buy the app?

But otherwise, I'm on my way to buy and looking forward to future updates

Edit: You answered this question up above

 

[Chrysogonus_Lie]

Why is this not available for my Lumia 620?

 

[phatboy66]

Absolutely amazing app! I would have no problem buying the paid version if the pictures were high def and not pixelated. I'm sure you can fix this issue really fast.

 

[Kevin N Smith]

NICE! However, would like support for 8x resolutions and Hd graphics.