Show HN: Telescope, a news reader app

[meteor333]

I got fed up with the news reader apps out there so I decided to make my own. Its a simple concept where it tracks all your favorite news sources for new posts and the social shares it received. Then it ranks it HN/Reddit style using social shares as upvotes. It's not meant to be alternative to HN, just a focused way to track your favorite sources. Please try it out and let me know what do you think,

http://telescope.surf/

Note: you can do 'Add to Homescreen' on mobile to make it as an app.

Please leave a feedback or any feature wishlist you may have.

Thanks!

[Xeoncross]

Over 50% of the posts are Trump. I would really like to see someone make an app that focuses on filtering through the click-bait articles we're fed to actually break news into important events and subjects.

I guess I don't consider "most shares" a good way to rank. Bush, Obama, then Trump always are at the top unless some other celebrity does something big.

Looks really nice, good job!

[meteor333]

Thank you. Unfortunately, thats what is trending currently. I get your point though. Im thinking of adding an ability to filter by keyword or category. Also I want to explore if I can group the same news to avoid echos, such as iphone X launch or something.

[avenius]

I've been gathering stories from a collection of prominent news sites for about a year, and apparently the media just loves writing about Trump. It's consistently been the most prominent keyword (in number / ratio of occurrances). So that's not necessarily the author's fault.

[dieg0]

Today, after the Mexico city earthquake, there where 50 buildings collapsed, probably hundreds of people dead, and a volcano erupting... but your "news" site doesn't show any of it... sorry but your site is a miss

[osrec]

The story is covered in the new section, about 8 items down when I looked. Either way, the app is ranking the stories based on shares - some things will trend more than others and float to the top, and other things might get hidden. Perhaps the creator could implement a way to pin stories that are obviously newsworthy to the top to prevent them being overshadowed by less newsworthy items. This does introduce a level of curation to the app, which may take more time than the maintainer wishes to devote to this project.

[jszymborski]

Are there any copyright issues with you showing the full article content?

I understand that the headlines, images and blurbs are from public RSS feeds, but I'm almost certain the article content doesn't, not at least for many of these.

[oblib]

I wondered about that too when I clicked on few WaPo article.

I've never paid for a subscription there but I do think they put out some quality journalism and I still get to catch a bit of their stuff with the Apple News app on my phone but I know Apple has cut a deal with them.

I was about to bookmark this but I won't use an app to bypass their paywall. I have to respect that and it'd be pretty hard to not if I loaded this every morning with the rest of my news sites.

But I do like the work they've done on it. It's very nice.

[yodon]

Two news sources that I'd like to see added are memeorandum.com (the best algorithmicly generated news feed I've found) and drudgereport.com (whose politics I disagree with but it's a hugely influential site and I try to avoid trapping myself in a bubble).

I haven't found a news reader type app that handles those two sites, so I find myself wasting huge amounts of time hitting those two pages and trying to skim their entire link list looking for the couple new articles since the last time I visited, guessing wrong, and re-opening articles I've already read twice before. I'd love to be able to use your site to newsreader those two.

(Memorandum is tricky, as it groups related articles together because so many news articles feed from the same source report, and that greatly reduces needlessly redundant reading. Even if you could only easily add drudge, that would be a huge time savings for folks like me)

[adamrezich]

Before I scroll down, every story on the page is similar perspectives on the same event (Trump at the UN), and the top story is posted by Shareblue. Maybe this is a fluke, but it's a terrible first impression for me as a user, and I won't be checking it again anytime soon.

[meteor333]

Looks like both are news aggregators themselves. It kind of makes it tricky. Let me look into it.

[scottjad]

Very nice. Two features I would like are tabs next to the "Today" tab that say "Yesterday" or maybe "48 Hours" and another that says "This week" or "Last week."

I often miss the news for a day (too busy) or a week (traveling/camping) and then want to catch up. Also sometimes I avoid the news for a day because I'm avoiding a sporting event spoiler. Most websites/newspapers are geared toward today and don't let you easily see what they looked like yesterday or a week ago. Even better would be allowing a time range and being able to see the top news during that time period.

Some basic filtering would be nice too. For example, I might want to see a politics-free feed, but right now that would require looking at three different categories. It would be nice if each category had a checkbox next to it, and clicking on the label selected the category and clicking on the checkbox deactivated it when no category is selected. Also it would be nice to be able to add search strings that would remove items, so I could add "Trump" to a list and not see any articles with that in the headline (or maybe in the summary). As it is now under Business I'd still get a lot of Trump-related news.

Also curious why you chose to have some feeds off by default.

[meteor333]

Yes im going to add time filtering soon as well.

I agree, Im exploring how I can allow filter by category or keyword without degrading the performance of the app.

>Also curious why you chose to have some feeds off by default. I just wanted to not auto-subscribe everyone to the new sources im adding.

[alexland]

Any plans for the ability to add custom sources? I'm assuming that's not a trivial thing to add, but definitely something I'd be interested in.

[meteor333]

Definitely. Thats the next important thing im working on. Stay tuned!

[neilellis]

When you get chance please wrap it is a desktop app, it's the sort of app I'd keep running like Tweetbot.

Oh and well done!

A competitor to Google News is great. The main problem I have with Google News is that it is always a few steps behind Twitter. It's really good if you're out of the loop, but behind the times if you're tracking a new story.

[oddlyaromatic]

Does Nativefier help you? https://github.com/jiahaog/Nativefier

[meteor333]

Thank you! Will do this soon

[usuallymatt]

I really like this! The only comment I'd make is to make the sidebar static so it stays there when you scroll down. Would be nice to switch topics quickly after I'm done skimming through headlines of another topic. Other than that I love it.

[superbeef150]

On that note, if the top bar is going to remain static, it might be worth putting some functionality in it on the desktop view so it's not just taking up screen space.

Not to sound nit-picky, but it seems easier to justify if it serves a purpose other than branding.

[fireworks10]

Awesome. Curious, what are you using to scrape sources, and for social counts?

[Toast_]

Not OP, but I'm doing something similar with huginn [0]; I use it to scrape deals and sent POST requests to an Azure ml web service, which is output as RSS.

[0]: https://github.com/huginn/huginn

[nsriv]

I love this! Desktop view could use more page width, but I love the concept. Adding in custom RSS URLs as sources could be a good direction to take as well.

[meteor333]

thanks a lot! you made my day! Feel free to add any wishlist through the comment bubble of the app. I'll try to be quick for new features.

Will work on screen size and RSS soon.

[ekbais]

> Then it ranks it HN/Reddit style using social shares as upvotes.

Where do you get the social shares? I don't see any share buttons on the webpage?

[notamy]

I would assume it means it takes the share buttons from the articles themselves and considers those the "upvotes."

[meteor333]

Im fetching it from FB, Linkedin and Reddit

[mxuribe]

I have been using Twitter lists, and simply adding the "breaking news" twitter accounts for a number of news sources...and this seems similar to that...however, I like this better! Great job! The only thing i would suggest is as others have noted: you might want to enable the feature for adding custom sources. Cheers!

[meteor333]

Thank you! Coming soon!

[webwanderings]

How are you going to sustain this? It is fairly fast and slick (I am a daily RSS reader who follow hundred of sources).

[meteor333]

Thank you! Im definitely going to offer monthly subscription plan so I can sustain it. Im okay to have just 10 regular users to keep it going since I want to keep it live just for my sake as well :)

Would you pay for it? how much do you think?

[5_minutes]

It's nice, good work there. Have any plans to open source it or sell it as a script?

[meteor333]

Thank you! I don't have concrete plans yet about this, but if i decide to do open source, I'll follow up.

[amrrs]

So it's PWA? So you must be able to send Push Notifications to Android devices? I'd be happy about it.

Ability to swipe out cards?

Nevertheless, A very clean minimalistic design choice.

[kazishariar]

Dude was this created in meteor.js? -Love it!, the minimalistic design, and saved from information overload is appreciated. Mind sharing the snippets?

[meteor333]

No just jquery and some custom JS

[vicmanster]

You need to make it so we can add our own news sources

[drvortex]

Nice, but really, it is a narrow column on a 4K screen. Can you make it adapt to screen sizes so that it can use at least 80% of the screen?

[meteor333]

I did some fixes to improve that experience. Let me know what do you think

[meteor333]

Good point. I'll work on it!

[masada]

The first few stories were from Vox, WaPo, and HuffPost.

No, thanks.