

Show HN: WorldNews – Fast, beautiful, low bandwidth news reader - diggan
http://victor.bjelkholm.com/worldnews/

======
diggan
Hey folks of HN!

I’ve recently developed an Firefox OS application that makes you able to read
news around the world with minimal amount of data usage and with maximum
speed. This is mainly for myself when I’m traveling in the metro and want
something to read but not use my whole data plan in one go. I then found that
other people might find it useful as well so I fixed up the UI a bit and
published it.

It’s mainly developed for Firefox OS but since it’s a responsive web
application, it’s usable on on desktop/other devices as well. It’s installable
from the Marketplace[0] or browsable directly from the same url as the
Marketplace application uses[1]

Features right now:

    
    
        Ability to read top voted news from r/worldnews on reddit[2]
        Removes images from articles to minimize data usage
    

Planned features:

    
    
        Able to switch between top voted news and new news from r/worldnews
        Ability to switch between different sources like reddit, HN and similar
        Cache the read articles on users device
        Ability to cache every article on current page for offline situations
        Show message when device is offline
    

The implementation is a mashup between the reddit API[3] and Readability
API[4] and the application itself is using React[5] and Bootstrap[6] for UI
elements.

My main focus have been to make the application as small as possible, with as
low data usage as possible with a clean user interface.

I would love to hear your honest feedback, good or bad.

If you happen to have spare time to waste, please also rate the application on
Marketplace[0] to help me get some extra visibility, which would lead to more
feedback and better application end the end! :)

Thanks!

[0] -
[https://marketplace.firefox.com/app/worldnews/](https://marketplace.firefox.com/app/worldnews/)

[1] -
[http://victor.bjelkholm.com/worldnews/](http://victor.bjelkholm.com/worldnews/)

[2] - [http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews](http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews)

[3] - [http://www.reddit.com/dev/api](http://www.reddit.com/dev/api)

[4] -
[https://www.readability.com/developers/api](https://www.readability.com/developers/api)

[5] - [http://facebook.github.io/react/](http://facebook.github.io/react/)

[6] - [http://getbootstrap.com/](http://getbootstrap.com/)

------
lie07
I like this. Though i would make those button a little smaller and headline a
bit bigger and maybe give an option to enable images?

~~~
diggan
Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, I might but I'm afraid that if the buttons are
smaller, it gets harder to press them on mobile. I'm gonna experiment with a
bit though.

I agree that the headline could be bigger, will fix that.

The option to enable images is definitely a good idea.

Thanks again for your input!

~~~
lie07
Or you can also have click(expand) on headline instead of the "READ" button?

~~~
diggan
Yeah, I've added the functionality to toggle the article on headline click,
such a obvious thing that you don't think about it. Still, I kept the Read
button for extra clarity.

~~~
lie07
no big deal, but everything else looks great.

------
computerjunkie
A cool implementation, The annoying thing about news sites is the amount of
unnecessary things on them. Personally, all I need is content (usually text)
and that's it. I guess stumbling upon Hacker News has had a great influence on
me.

~~~
diggan
Thanks! I completely agree with you and that's exactly why WorldNews was born.
The extra things is disturbing but also makes the site slow and use a lot of
data.

