DEV Community

Cover image for Monocle Reader - Beta Preview
tmartty
tmartty

Posted on

Monocle Reader - Beta Preview

Websites you follow, at a glance
Twitter, YouTube, blogs and feeds, all in one place.

Shut up and take my money meme

You can put your wallet down now, that's just what the new Monocle motto will be.

Okay so, I've been coding a lot of the newer features to be implemented in the Beta release next month and also thinking about marketing, pricing strategies and such but right now I just wanted to take a little break and show a bit of the progress and maybe hope to get some hype before the big launch.

The general look and feel is way more Material, simpler, nicer and content-focused.
General Preview

There will also be some handy folder view screens, so you can view all of a folders content in one page, instead of having to click on each feed individually. There's this ultra compact horizontal scrolling option:
Horizontal FolderView Preview

Or if you're more into verticalicious scrolling, there'll be that option too:
Vertical FolderView Preview

Probably the biggest feature will be the addition of the Saved (or Read Later) section, where you can save sites to, you guessed it, read later. Of course this comes along with a nice browser extension (Chrome & Firefox) to save those links that you get when you're in the middle of something and can't read inmediately.
Read Later Browser Extension

That's all for now, but there's many more in the workings, and now that I've quit my job, I can dedicate most of my time to developing Monocle! (I still have to eat so there's freelance clients too)

If you're curious and can't wait, you can already use the Alpha version @ monoclereader.com

Feedback appreciated!

Top comments (7)

Collapse
 
tmartty profile image
tmartty

Thanks! Well, right now I've got setup Google Analytics and Firebase as a database, so privacy is bound to those services.

I had read about Feedbin's 'Private by Default' 'feature' and I really liked their approach, but that's not an easy thing to implement, especially since I've started not so long ago.

I do have privacy in mind though, and I'd like to, in the future, take Feedbins approach and remove or anonimize trackers and stuff.

I'm also adding other signup methods for the beta release!

 
tmartty profile image
tmartty

That's usually the most tedious part, since you can't really see results or progress, and little errors might take forever. If you're curious and interested, I'd recommend using Quasar, that's what I used for Monocle and what I'm mostly using for other projects too.

 
tmartty profile image
tmartty

Yeah, it's hard to get off the grid from those services, thanks for the alternatives you shared, I'll check them out.

About charging customers, yes, that's my monetization plan: I'll have a paid subscription to be able to access all features, whilst probably having a free trial for a few days/weeks (or maybe a free tier with limited features but unlimited time, haven't decided yet) so no, data will not be part of my business model.

Collapse
 
xarjunshetty profile image
Arjun Shetty

Beautiful! Loved it.. Good to see a feed reader simple and easy to use. Great work!

Collapse
 
tmartty profile image
tmartty

Thanks! Do you use any other feed reader? What would it take to make you switch to Monocle?

 
tmartty profile image
tmartty

Thanks Alex, have a nice day!

Collapse
 
tmartty profile image
tmartty

Awesome! Is it live somewhere to check it out?