In Praise of Newshutch

Since this whole syndication feed thing took off, I’ve tried a number of clients, both thick and thin. Amongst others, I’ve tried FeedDemon (twice), Rojo and FeedLounge. All of which is not to say I’m some kind of expert, but that I have at least some basis for comparison when I say that Newshutch has provided me with a far more enjoyable experience.

Newshutch is better for all the usual reasons: it’s simple, it’s elegant, it’s usable. The other aggregators I’ve tried have just tried too hard. Tried too hard to give me more features, to make me interested in things I really wasn’t, tried too hard to make me click on their adverts or sign up to their other services. Newshutch doesn’t do that, it just gives me what I want: an easy way to keep up with the feeds I want to read.

The interface is simple and usable. All the options are in plain sight, not hidden by fancy buttons or icons, or at the bottom of the page. When you scroll down to the bottom of a list of entries for a given feed, the same options as those at the top—”Open next”, “Mark all read & open next” and “Mark all read”—are sitting there, so you don’t have to go all the way back up if you want to do anything. Functionality is clustered in sensible ways: anything that pertains to things outside the current clutch of feeds (their blog and forums, your profile, the ‘logout’ option) is all together in a nice clear menu at the top. Managing feeds and how you read them is handled through a simple tabbed navigation.

There’s also a kind of seamlessness in the way it operates: it feels like an application, but with all the benefits of a web-based one (I’m not the slave of a single computer; it just works through my browser). When you click on a particular feed, the favicon is momentarily replaced by a little wheel of dots (just like the Firefox tab reloading), and then your new page appears, without the page itself having to reload. Little touches that complement the essential simplicity of the application—that’s what I like about Newshutch.

When I first started using it, back in June, it had one major downside: it was slow. Really slow. Loading up new feeds seemed to take forever, as did executing any action. Whatever was causing this, whether it was inadequate server architecture or software bugs, they’ve fixed it—it’s nice and fast now.

A failing has been transformed into a virtue, because they improved it. Because they keep improving it, making it faster, smoothing out the interface, but always remaining true to (what I assume is) its core mission, to provide a simple and seamless web-based feedreader. I notice the improvements, on the level that it feels smoother, faster, more intuitive, but noticing is a lot like not noticing: it just feels like this was how it was always meant to be. Iterating towards perfection.

In fact, it’s so good I’d probably pay for it. If they added some import/export options (not as easy as it sounds, I’m sure) so one could import bookmarks or feed listings from other readers, and take one’s data with one if one ever decided to leave the service, I would definitely pay for it—and so, I’m sure, would a lot of other people.

Ryan, obviously a far more observant person than I, notes in the comments that import and export are, in fact, already available in Newshutch: just click on the ‘Manage’ tab and you’ll see the options to import or export an OPML file.