not hiding starred articles

[navisence]

Hi,

Once I've read an article in a feed (often just a summary) and I want to explore further at a later time, I use starring as some kind of todo-list. This means I usually have no unread starred articles. So when I enable hiding of read feeds, in version 1.2.16 the starred article feed also disappears. In the older version I was using (1.2.11.1), the starred article feed was always visible.

I think it would be useful to add an option that the "Special" feeds (or at least the starred articles feed) are never hidden. I've been looking through the preferences, but couldn't find any indication of this yet.

[fox]

It was a painful decision. I went with hiding everything for the sake of consistency, but you have a good point. I'll think about it, maybe add an option or (most probably) stop special feeds from being hidden.

[clark]

I'm all for this idea. There is a similar concept on Bloglines and I have found this way of using starred articles very useful. On Bloglines, you also get another counter on the side bar to tell you how many articles you've marked like that. For example :

Feed F (4) (2)

lets you know that Feed F has 4 unread articles and 2 starred articles. Having used a similar system on Bloglines for a long time before switching to TT-RSS I can tell you it is very useful and with the used of font weight and color, it is not ambiguous (as it might seem at first). Showing the user that there are starred articles also lowers the risk of confusion that you mention above.

What do you think ?

[Bastian]

If you're talking about having a count and being able to click to view a list of starred articles that are marked as read in addition to unread, then I wholeheartedly agree that this would rule.

Currently I mark articles as starred for later viewing, however as soon as I mark all articles as read above the one I'm on, that one inevitably is marked as read and not seen again. I tried setting the view on starred articles to "all" instead of just unread/adaptive, however that changed it for all feeds, which didn't work out so well.

[fox]

clark,

I'm all for this idea.

Which idea do you mean - the never-hide-special-feeds idea from Oct '07 or a separate counter? The former was actually fixed, I think, so Starred and other virtual feeds should be always visible.

I can't say I like the separate counter for starred items. It looks like too much UI clutter to me. I'm not sure about you, but I'd be constantly distracted. Plus, it's basically twice the load on counter generation, which is expensive as hell.

Bastian,

Currently I mark articles as starred for later viewing, however as soon as I mark all articles as read above the one I'm on, that one inevitably is marked as read and not seen again.

Maybe I'm not getting something here, but you can (temporarily) switch the view mode to "Starred" which would display all starred articles in current feed, unread or not. That should be basically the same thing, sans the counter to click on.

Also, adaptive mode is slightly different for Starred feed, it doesn't filter out read articles if you have something unread:

[clark]

fox,

I think I misunderstood the feature request then

My problem here is that I don't really know if I have starred articles at a given time without going in the special starred feed. For the usage I have of staring article to "mark it for later", it is a bit of a problem.

For the cluttering risk, as I said, it really works out OK in Bloglines.com. I understood though that it can be a load problem. Would it be possible to go somewhere in the middle by just showing the total number of starred articles at the right of the special starred feed ?

What do you think ?

[fox]

My problem here is that I don't really know if I have starred articles at a given time without going in the special starred feed.

Hmm. So, what about changing the view mode to Starred?



It should show you your "marked for later" articles in current feed, without the hassle of browsing to some other feed. It won't show you the number of starred articles, but is it really that important?

Would it be possible to go somewhere in the middle by just showing the total number of starred articles at the right of the special starred feed ?

1) I'm not exactly sure why this information is useful. Imagine that I currently have 283 starred articles in all feeds, 5 of which are unread. Why would I need to know the first number?

2) Adding a second counter to just one feed will also break interface consistency, which I'd rather not do.

3) That reminds me, tt-rss also supports published articles, which behave very much along the lines of starred ones. Should we add a third counter for those if somebody requests it? I could easily imagine a very similar use case.

[clark]

1) the problem is that it is an action and I have to remember to do it... The good thing for me with a number shown is that it reminds me that I have starred articles without me checking.
2) I can understand that.
3) True. And why not

I can see that I have not convinced you. Thanks anyway for your time

[fox]

No problem. Don't let it dissuade you from feature suggestions in the future.

I'll keep your use case in mind. Maybe I'll think of something with less UI clutter to solve this problem. That sort of thing happened a few times, although this might take several milestones to materialize.

[clark]

No worries ! This is not important enough for me to make me switch back to bloglines

And thanks for your work on this very nice piece of software.