Collector for Windows Phone (Flipboard alternative)

Hello everyone,

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

Attachment 30954

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

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- Automatic download of outdated collections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

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

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

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.

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 :D Good stuff though, I look forward to seeing how this develops, off to purchase now...

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

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?

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.

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?

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

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

Thanks

I like newser a lot. Just a summary of news

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

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 :-)

cool going to check it out~!

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.

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 😊

Why is this not available for my Lumia 620?

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.

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

A night/dark theme would be nice eventually. When you open a story, its on a white screen and this kills me at night. After using it all today, I don't have any complaints yet.

I bought the app yesterday and I've been impressed. It looks good and works pretty well.

However, of course, it's still an unfinished work. Still, what I'd like to see added :
-Whole articles in the "preview" page. It just looks much better than the page where you read the article on a white background.
-Side swipes to go to the next or last article.
-Possibility to share stuff by SMS/Email
-The app randomly closed a couple of times (Nokia 920)...
-Also, I've added some more feeds but after some, I just can't scroll down the list of feeds to edit them or just look if I added them or not.

Keep up the great work. Forza!

Originally Posted by IN5TIGATOR

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

Seems like all your concerns will be gone by the end of this month according to the dev. :)

I also bought the app. Its a great start. Some of the built in feeds could be better. Scrolling could be a bit more smooth and refined. Swiping horizontally to get to different articles / pages would also be cool.

But its definitely a beautiful, well designed app. Looking forward to updates.

You should throw up a link in r/windowsphone. I'm sure some would appreciate it.

Originally Posted by KQ17

I bought the app yesterday and I've been impressed. It looks good and works pretty well.

However, of course, it's still an unfinished work. Still, what I'd like to see added :
-Whole articles in the "preview" page. It just looks much better than the page where you read the article on a white background.
-Side swipes to go to the next or last article.

:)

If they are done well, and are smooth/responsive, gesture controls should be used as often as possible in apps.

Thanks again for your feedbacks!

We'll definitely implement the horizontal swipe between articles, email sharing and a lot of other features. We are doing our best to push big updates in the following weeks, stay tuned! You can easily get all our updates following us on Twitter https://twitter.com/collectorwp

Nicholas

Okay, one feature request; it would be nifty to be able to rearrange the collections by tapping, holding and dragging - just like with tiles. When you add many the favorites should be on top..

Originally Posted by danjah

Okay, one feature request; it would be nifty to be able to rearrange the collections by tapping, holding and dragging - just like with tiles. When you add many the favorites should be on top..

We're designing a new horizontal dashboard, and you're be able to rearrange the collections (probably in the same way that you do on your home screen).
Unfortunately I don't have any live date about this feature (as it will be pretty huge), but it will be before the end of April. ;)

Love this app. I was the first reviewer. There is a lot of potential. I can't wait to see how it continues to develop.

Awesome app. Will buy soon.

First of all, I would like to say that I think this is a fantastic initiative and an instant buy for me, but I do have some thoughts on a few things in the app:

Attachment 31090

I would also perhaps see some more alternatives for live tiles (showing images etc.), but other than that, I feel that this is already a very solid news reader with a really nice design.
Keep up the great work, and I'm eager to see what improvements may come in the future!

I need to change region to finally see this. Can you publish this worldwide?

Originally Posted by Chrysogonus_Lie

I need to change region to finally see this. Can you publish this worldwide?

Hi, we'll try to publish our next update Wordwide. You can expect to see the app available on all markets before the end of the month.

Originally Posted by Jonas Jonsson

First of all, I would like to say that I think this is a fantastic initiative and an instant buy for me, but I do have some thoughts on a few things in the app:

I would also perhaps see some more alternatives for live tiles (showing images etc.), but other than that, I feel that this is already a very solid news reader with a really nice design.
Keep up the great work, and I'm eager to see what improvements may come in the future!

Thanks for your feedbacks, I just forwarded the mockup to our design team.

About the live tiles, our second update (v1.2) will feature a lot of improvements for the live tiles so stay tuned!

Great start!! Good idea with Google Now like card view. I like the UI.

I've a personal nitpick. In the article reading mode can you try disabling the article moving around(pan around) when trying to scroll down? I like pages which doesn't move sideways when trying to scroll down.

Looking forward to it being available in Indonesia market (since this is a paid app)

Originally Posted by Chrysogonus_Lie

Looking forward to it being available in Indonesia market (since this is a paid app)

We're submitting an update today to enable more markets like Malaysia and Indonesia. We'll keep you updated!

When should this app available in indonesia? Im about impatient abt this one

How's about making it free for 24-48 hours, so we can see it fully working? I like the app, but cannot warrant spending the ££ until i have seen it working with more than one interest.

Originally Posted by lnsertName

How's about making it free for 24-48 hours, so we can see it fully working? I like the app, but cannot warrant spending the ££ until i have seen it working with more than one interest.

There's no need to make it free, you can check by yourself all the features of the app with just the two-collections limit. You can also remove any collection that you've created, and add a new one (up to two collections in the trial version).

Edit: You can also watch a video review of the app here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8Cl3ejGl-w

Hi guys, we just sent an update to Microsoft with the following changes:

- 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

We expect to see it live on the marketplace within 5 days.

Cheers

Waiting to try it.

Originally Posted by lnsertName

How's about making it free for 24-48 hours, so we can see it fully working? I like the app, but cannot warrant spending the ££ until i have seen it working with more than one interest.

Stop whining. Support the devs.

Originally Posted by lnsertName

How's about making it free for 24-48 hours, so we can see it fully working? I like the app, but cannot warrant spending the ££ until i have seen it working with more than one interest.

There is plenty to see without paying, I don't get your point? It's hardly expensive too, think about the effort put in.

I saw this thread literally minutes after buying the paid version of Fuse. Collector looks good enough I might not even use Fuse after the next couple Collector updates come out.

Actually, with my obsessive use of news apps, I'll probably keep both. Bottom line: good work on this app.

Originally Posted by Nicholas Valbusa

Hi guys, we just sent an update to Microsoft with the following changes:

- 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

We expect to see it live on the marketplace within 5 days.

Cheers

Can't wait for the update!

Hello,

During these days we're also working on the new redesigned horizontal home screen, and Facebook integration. Check the pic below! ;)

Attachment 31316

Looks good.

Quick update: the 1.2 is live on the Marketplace! :)

Yesterday we sent the 1.3 to Microsoft. It should be available within the next 4 days, and here is the changelog:

- Facebook integration (timeline collection, likes, etc)
- New re-designed home screen (it's very cool, trust me)
- Share via email
- Other little improvements and fixes to make the app bulletproof

I'll let you know as soon as the update will be available ;)

Attachment 31572

Very impressed by your app! Let me know if you'd like help translating to german and dutch.

Originally Posted by DutchmanIII

Very impressed by your app! Let me know if you'd like help translating to german and dutch.

It would be very nice if you could help us with the german/dutch translations! :)
Could you PM me your email so we can discuss it?

Maybe I could help with French :)

Originally Posted by KQ17

Maybe I could help with French :)

It would be precious! Could you PM me with your email as well? :)


All our contributors will get access to the beta versions of Collector, which means that you can try all our features few weeks before they go live, and of course you don't have to pay £1.49 to enjoy Collector on your phone.

@Nicholas Valbusa As a frequent user now, the only thing which really bothers me is the time taken to refresh the collections. I know that it's very hard to collect content from multiple sources very quickly. Are you doing it with a server or is it fetched from the phone directly? To compare(not fairly) with Flipboard, it refreshes feeds lot quicker which I believe is due to the content fetched from their servers and not directly. But as I said, it's not a fair comparison with their huge investments and you guys as small indie developers. It was just a nitpick. If you can optimize it a little, might make a great difference.

Originally Posted by blnwp

@Nicholas Valbusa As a frequent user now, the only thing which really bothers me is the time taken to refresh the collections. I know that it's very hard to collect content from multiple sources very quickly. Are you doing it with a server or is it fetched from the phone directly? To compare(not fairly) with Flipboard, it refreshes feeds lot quicker which I believe is due to the content fetched from their servers and not directly. But as I said, it's not a fair comparison with their huge investments and you guys as small indie developers. It was just a nitpick. If you can optimize it a little, might make a great difference.

Hi, this is currently something that internally was discussed a lot during the development, and we decided to opt for the "fetched by the phone" for two reasons:

- As you said, we're small indie devs, so there's no money to get a big infrastructure like Flipboard does
- Collections are custom made rather than "chosen by the server". This means that "Technology" could be different for each users; it really depends on what you decided to put inside.

Right now, we're planning to making huge improvements on the collections update, I promise that it will be very fast in the near future :)

Great, thanks!

The most missing feature is an option to create an account that saves your feeds... so that way you can login from different devices and have your feed right away.
Tom.

Originally Posted by TopTomy

Great, thanks!

The most missing feature is an option to create an account that saves your feeds... so that way you can login from different devices and have your feed right away.
Tom.

This feature (login/signup/backup/restore) will probably be implemented around the end of April :) don't worry!

Oh, awesome!
thanks for your respond :)

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.

Originally Posted by Al_2

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

Originally Posted by Al_2

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 ;-)

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.

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.

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

Originally Posted by blnwp

- 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 :)

Got the update today. Great job.

Originally Posted by Nicholas Valbusa

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 :)

Originally Posted by Nicholas Valbusa

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

** yes add thAt. That'd awesome !

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

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.

Originally Posted by brunok

[*]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.

Originally Posted by ally42

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:
Attachment 31923

USA Today:
Attachment 31921

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...

Originally Posted by Al_2

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.

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.

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

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!

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

Any news?

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)

Purchased the App to help support you guys. Unfortunately i find Weaver has a better presentation at the moment (sorry, just being honest) so im using it much more right now. If you guys could add many more resources to pull articles from, in addition to modifying the layout ill run back.

keep working hard, its getting there.

Originally Posted by chezm

Purchased the App to help support you guys. Unfortunately i find Weaver has a better presentation at the moment (sorry, just being honest) so im using it much more right now. If you guys could add many more resources to pull articles from, in addition to modifying the layout ill run back.

keep working hard, its getting there.

Thanks for your feedback, we'll do our best to make the app better on each iteration. :smile:

Originally Posted by Nicholas Valbusa

Thanks for your feedback, we'll do our best to make the app better on each iteration. :smile:

It's definitely getting there. Each update improves it. Looking forward to the updated article view page. :)

Two things holding me back from using this more are:

1. The pixelated images
2. The live tile implementation (both design and update frequency)

Hello everyone,

few days ago we sent to Microsoft the version 1.5 of Collector with the following changelog:

- Bugfix for random crashes at startup (finally!)
- Bugfix for random crashes while reading the articles (yay!)
- Unread/read articles
- Fix for low-quality and pixelated images on some sources (especially the ones with social sharing buttons)
- Other little improvements

We expect to see it live on the Marketplace this Saturday.

Moreover, we planned to add Google Reader support for the next iteration (that will be released probably around the 12th of May) so you'll be able to import your Google Reader feeds collection before it will be closed. :-)

Stay tuned!

Hi Nicholus/Collector team,

You have build a great flipboard alternative. I used it for quite sometime myself. Don't you think its better to add the page flip effect like already available in Flipboard to collector app as well? Or may be instead a page turn effect? An app named WeatherFlow already offers this kind of effect on Windows Phone.

Thanks
Arpit

Originally Posted by charming_arpit

Hi Nicholus/Collector team,

You have build a great flipboard alternative. I used it for quite sometime myself. Don't you think its better to add the page flip effect like already available in Flipboard to collector app as well? Or may be instead a page turn effect? An app named WeatherFlow already offers this kind of effect on Windows Phone.

Thanks
Arpit

Hi Arpit,

thanks for your idea, I'll definitely take a look at WeatherFlow to see how they implemented the page-turn effect. I'd love to make something similar (like Flipboard does) but I'll need to find out a c# solution to implement it :)

Will keep you updated, thanks for now

Nicholas

Is it possible to use feedly or other rss Service api for the synchronization between devices ?

Originally Posted by handisetyadi

Is it possible to use feedly or other rss Service api for the synchronization between devices ?

We do have plans to add Signup/Login feature as well as APIs to read/write collections and other stuff.

Excellent News Reader. The regular updates to the App are the best. Finally a good Flipboard alternative. Flipboard can now continue to "consider" building a WP8 App. Once Feedly is integrated, this will be the 'mother of all news readers apps' on the WP platform.

Thanks a ton !

Originally Posted by khatta

Excellent News Reader. The regular updates to the App are the best. Finally a good Flipboard alternative. Flipboard can now continue to "consider" building a WP8 App. Once Feedly is integrated, this will be the 'mother of all news readers apps' on the WP platform.

Thanks a ton !

Thanks for your kind feedback! We'll keep working to make the app better every week. :)


A little update, the 1.5.1 is on the store:
- Bugfix for random crashes at startup
- Import feeds from Google Reader
- Unread/read articles
- Fix for low-quality images in some feeds
- Little improvements

Hey all,

I've been using Weave for a long time now and I think it's the best thing sense sliced bread (So I dont need a app for every site or subject I read a lot). I just saw this thread today. Is this much better than Weave is ? Just wondering is it worth upgrading to this app ? The full price @ $1.49 seems pretty reasonable (Weave is $9.99 for the full no ads app), I know the demo is limited and I watched the video but, not sure what the advantages are over Weave.

Anyone ?

PS. To the Dev, not trying to pick on your app in anway, just wanted to know as I have been using one app for a LONG time now.

Not at all familiar with Weave. But I think the only way to get an idea of an app is to use it. I don't recall if Collector has a trial option. Personally, I like it. Still has some ways to go. But the developer is really great with keeping users updated on updates and progress of the app

Originally Posted by TonyDedrick

Not at all familiar with Weave. But I think the only way to get an idea of an app is to use it. I don't recall if Collector has a trial option. Personally, I like it. Still has some ways to go. But the developer is really great with keeping users updated on updates and progress of the app

Ok, here is a question, in Weave, I selected Windows Phone and it went out and pulls all the RSS feeds for Windows Phone(10 or more sites I see time to time) and I had weave setup in about 2 min with Gaming, Windows Phone, news, etc. In setup for Collector, I just see the sites I can select but, can't select a subject like I could in weave. Is it possable with this app ?

Originally Posted by DavidinCT

Ok, here is a question, in Weave, I selected Windows Phone and it went out and pulls all the RSS feeds for Windows Phone(10 or more sites I see time to time) and I had weave setup in about 2 min with Gaming, Windows Phone, news, etc. In setup for Collector, I just see the sites I can select but, can't select a subject like I could in weave. Is it possable with this app ?

Hello,

you can search for any other website using our search-engine, or you can just add the website by typing its url.

Collector lets you create your own collections which contains any number of sources (feeds, blogs, websites, etc).
Moreover, you can also create a collection with your twitter/facebook/instagram timeline.

Please let me know if you have any other thought ;)

p.s. check the attached pic here

Attachment 33920

Nicholas

Originally Posted by DavidinCT

Hey all,

I've been using Weave for a long time now and I think it's the best thing sense sliced bread (So I dont need a app for every site or subject I read a lot). I just saw this thread today. Is this much better than Weave is ? Just wondering is it worth upgrading to this app ? The full price @ $1.49 seems pretty reasonable (Weave is $9.99 for the full no ads app), I know the demo is limited and I watched the video but, not sure what the advantages are over Weave.

Anyone ?

PS. To the Dev, not trying to pick on your app in anway, just wanted to know as I have been using one app for a LONG time now.

Well, Weave is a more "mature" app since it's been developed for a while. However, Collector is improving a lot and I think it has a great future, although it's already a good app. I bought it to support development, but I don't use it as much as Nextgen Reader.

Originally Posted by Nicholas Valbusa

Hello,

you can search for any other website using our search-engine, or you can just add the website by typing its url.

Collector lets you create your own collections which contains any number of sources (feeds, blogs, websites, etc).
Moreover, you can also create a collection with your twitter/facebook/instagram timeline.

Please let me know if you have any other thought ;)

p.s. check the attached pic here

Attachment 33920

Nicholas

Just tested this, works great

Nicholas Valbusa, fantastic looking application. I just bought it...only two things I see. I know you're getting a lot of comments, but I hope you can consider these..
- Is it possible to add an option for downloading the full-article directly (instead of the summary)? (I'm without connection for an hour, so RSS is my way to read while being offline, but seeing only a small portion of the article is a deal killer for me. Hope this can be an option in a future release.
- Make tiles smaller on home screen to show more perhaps? (I have about 6 categories..maybe add option to size them like how WP 7.8/8 allows for their tiles as an idea).

How have I missed this app? Absolutely gorgeous! I'd love to see what these guys could do with a Windows 8 app.

Originally Posted by opacityzero

Nicholas Valbusa, fantastic looking application. I just bought it...only two things I see. I know you're getting a lot of comments, but I hope you can consider these..
- Is it possible to add an option for downloading the full-article directly (instead of the summary)? (I'm without connection for an hour, so RSS is my way to read while being offline, but seeing only a small portion of the article is a deal killer for me. Hope this can be an option in a future release.
- Make tiles smaller on home screen to show more perhaps? (I have about 6 categories..maybe add option to size them like how WP 7.8/8 allows for their tiles as an idea).

Hello,

we are currently not downloading the whole article offline just because the database only supports strings with a length up to 5000 characters, which means that we cannot use it.
We could rather use the local storage, like saving html files, and we'll probably add a setting to enable it in the near future so stay tuned! :)

About the tiles, now they are automatically arranged to display up to 6 tiles per page. In the future, we'll add an option to manual adjust the size of each tile.

----

For all the other guys here:

We just released the 1.5.2 with the following features:

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

We really hope you like the new article reading page. Please let us know your thoughts :)

Cheers

Nicholas

You guys are beasts. Great work. This keeps getting better and better.