Comments on: Snackr: Randomness goes viral

By: chvnx

chvnx — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 05:27:25 +0000

I downloaded Snackr last night. It’s just too perfect for me. I absolutely love it and I doubt I’ll ever want to compute without an app like this again. In less than 24 hours Snackr has revolutionized my desktop. I have a large, wide screen with a high resolution and this app, along with a couple google desktop widgets, makes my screen a lot more efficient and will save me plenty of time.

By: Franky TX

Franky TX — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:08:54 +0000

yeah I keep trying to stretch and resize the Snackr on the right side bar to either squeeze it down temporarily or make it biGGer for a moment. I crave a different kind of information. not just news but stuff that comes out from some rss feeds, life. I may have a multitude of windows open on my three screens, yet I want to make the Snackr Wide sometimes. So I can see your cousins blogs from Singapore and PI and Japan as they wave at me on their blogs from overseas, how about making color selection for certain blogs so that they stick out?? Not just changing the icon as there are so many and they don’t stand out. Use a particular color for a few of the feeds so that as they pass by the brain and eye will automatically train to it just for a moment and as the eye brain translation makes the dissemination of new or old or important, the background color would have done its job.

By: nj

nj — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 05:06:41 +0000

@andrew–yup, performance is an issue on the Mac at the moment. I’m hoping to get the AIR team to look at the issue and see if they can figure out what’s going on.

By: andrew

andrew — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 04:16:34 +0000

ok – snackr is one of the coolest apps i have installed since twitterific – completely restored my interest in my many dozen rss fees… problem: currently it is chowing 21% of my processor on a meaty macbook-pro any thoughts on getting the processor hit under control?

By: nj

nj — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 05:48:04 +0000

@Quicky–yup, that was actually part of my original idea for Snackr, but I haven’t implemented the prioritization scheme yet. It’s definitely something I want, as I have the same issue (some feeds I want to read every post from, others I just want to sample). I’m also planning to add categories, so you can choose to have the ticker only show items from a given category.

@System64–hoping to get that in soon; a lot of people are requesting it.

By: System64

System64 — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 03:28:32 +0000

It will be great if the Snackr application can be mimised to the tray instead of the taskbar. It makes it look neater.

By: Quicky

Quicky — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 19:12:29 +0000

Hi nj, this looks like a lovely application to deal with the everlasting flow of new posts in the dozens of feeds in my Google Reader.

However, I do have one concern. Maybe I just don’t really understand how it works, but as far as I can see you are randomly taking unread stuff from my feeds to display in Snackr, right? Some posts I’ll notice, others I won’t. But what if I really don’t want to miss posts of certain feeds?

For example, my girl friend only writes on her blog every few weeks or so, but I don’t want to miss any of those posts. While at the same time I have a few feeds like digg, techcrunch and mixx that have dozens of new posts every day, and I don’t care much for most of those.

Maybe it’s an idea to make it possible to give certain feeds higher priority so that they are displayed more often until you’ve read them?

By: Bryan Woods

Bryan Woods — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 14:46:36 +0000

Snackr is actually one of those worldview-shattering technologies to me, and I know two things.
1) That I’m not alone, and
2) That it might make me dumb or crazy.

Snackr itself doesn’t really do a whole lot. It just takes my feeds and scrolls them randomly on my screen.

But _visually_ it does so much more.

I had a hard time getting into RSS feeds for years even though I loved the concept. But the problem at first was that I was logging into Google reader once a day, and seeing hundreds of articles. Many I had already read, many I didn’t care to read, and the fact that I had to remember to go check them out bothered me.

Then I started using desktop clients to train my brain for “river of news” mode. I used Attensa for a few weeks and liked it, but the bugs started getting the best of me. Still, I subscribed to more feeds than I knew I would ever read, and left the client running at all times. Again, I did this for no reason other than to train myself to be used to the “river of news” flow, and to be able to realize I had no control over the flow of information, and I was lucky to be able to jump in and out as I pleased.

But then, just as I began tweeting daily asking for new feeds and new desktop readers, Snackr came along.

And while I can’t expect it would have such a shattering effect on anyone else, I realized it was exactly what I was looking for:

An application that literally flows my news in a river, one that I can pay attention to or ignore at my leisure, but — most importantly — an application that actually causes me to read _more_ items daily since it is always so close to my fingertips.

It’s changed the way I look at RSS feeds and for that reason I couldn’t be happier.

By: Blaenk Denum

Blaenk Denum — Sat, 31 May 2008 07:12:28 +0000

One of the things on the wish list:

Sync feed lists/read items with popular blog readers (bloglines, google reader, newsgator, etc.) and/or use a web-based blog reader as a back-end through api

Yes!! This would make Snackr 100% perfect!

By: Jean-François Durocher

Jean-François Durocher — Wed, 28 May 2008 18:49:41 +0000

This is really a great application. I never really liked RSS readers but this one is just too great looking and usefull to not use. Looking forward to see the next available features !

Great job !