I’m not sure why but I genuinely love this Windows 95 style interface for Instagram coded up by Gabrielle Wee.
This has been bugging me as well. I have Instagram as a channel, and there are almost always new photos there, so the unread count is pretty much meaningless.
I was also thinking of a third option which is to only track whether or not there are new posts, not the number of new posts. This could show up in the API as unread: true
rather than unread: 24
.
I pushed an update to Aperture which allows you to toggle per-channel whether read state tracking is enabled. There are two modes, one where it returns the count of the number of unread items, and the other where it returns only true
or false
depending on whether there are new items.
For my super busy feeds, it wasn't useful having the counts, but I do like a subtle indicator there are new posts.
There are also some channels I don't want to be bothered about at all, so I've disabled read state tracking on those.
This means the Microsub API is now returning either an integer or a boolean for the unread
property on channels, e.g.:
{
"channels": [
{
"uid": "notifications",
"name": "Notifications",
"unread": 0
},
{
"uid": "31eccfe322d6c48c50dea2c84efc74ff",
"name": "IndieWeb"
"unread": true
}
]
}
Monocle+Aperture are coming along nicely!
I just got my GitHub notifications piped into the reader, which is a much nicer experience than reading them via email or trying to track them down on github.com!
I have a few channels set to show just an indicator dot when there are new posts rather than showing the number of new posts, a much calmer experience.
Unread posts show up with a faint yellow glow around them, and they're automatically marked as read when they scroll off the screen.
At this point, I've actually moved all of the feeds I was previously following from IRC into Aperture as a way to force myself to continue putting the finishing touches on it!