…too bad, that in this round only bloggers were commenting on me.
And too bad, that they are group of users, that certainly urge to use classical RSS readers - as they are fetching literally tens of dozens of feeds… They also weren’t reading my blog entries close enough - or maybe I used too much of technobabble. And high-profile bloggers are NOT average users (e.g. typical users of iLife and iWork). They usually know what Terminal is (and that it’s not hidden in cupboard).
Herald, in its idea, is not only newspaper-like reader with printing ability - it’s of course important part of Herald, but it’s not it’s heart.
Heart of Herald is social experience - unique ability of sharing your newspapers, feeds, fancy comments for them, no matter how you’ll name. Tearing pages or columns and hiding them in your scrapbook. Sharing scrapbook. Everything in beautiful layout.
If I’ll be lucky enough, I even hope for DRMed feeds for big titles like NYT or Macworld. Thanks to this, Herald can become new Zinio - but not as bad as it’s predecessor.
Additionally, you can export your newspapers to PDFs and send them to your friends, export as HTML to Herald’s (or your LAN’s) servers for archive and sharing, print and hang as daily bulletin in your school - there is really no limits for this functionality.
Second most important feature is ability to create feeds for sites that do not possess such functionality (or only available feeds are shorts), based e.g. on HTML-diffing. Too many websites do not “mirror” themselves in RSS feeds - because of this, Herald will be helpful.
As most of people are used to use newspaper, as for now it’s most convenient way of serving news - but Herald will also feature new interface for serving ONLY news, not in newspaper form, in news form. Everything for everyone.
I made suggestion about this in previous news (do you remember sledgehammer?) , and I hoped, that I’ll be able to use it as secret weapon near to finals, but I see, that I’ll have to show it soon, with it’s mockup on which I was working independently for past days.
Busy businessman or commuting student? Export to PDA or print and read in underground.
Geek or blogger, feel new way of getting news in front of you.
What is more important, both interfaces will be switchable (immediately from newspaper to feeder) - you won’t loose time for setting (except initial setting), especially when Herald will be able to import feeds from another readers.
But this can come true only with your help. Your votes.
Because it will be really hard to get Herald done without help of MDA crew - and as for me, it’s the app that is really missing - on every platform - Windows, Mac OS X, Linux.
