Well Read - One Week Later

It's been a week since I learnt about Inkwell's API and got an agent to start work on an RSS reader. Since then, Well Read has been in a state of flux, as I ask for agents to make changes to the interaction and layout. I think I've got it in a pretty good state now, certainly in a state that works well for me.

The Today and Recent tabs still retain their original behaviour, although the idea of using 6:00 pm of the previous evening as the cutoff for "todays' posts" was a good one. Being where I'm located in the world, many people I follow publish posts while I'm asleep. I recently added a tab for bookmarks which uses Micro.blog's bookmarking feature. Any post can be added as a bookmark, and since there's no real way to get to a post once it drops out of the Recent tab (well, apart from opening it up in Inkwell proper), I have in mind this feature to act as a place to stash posts for later. So I tried making bookmarks as easy to add as possible. Sliding aside the item in the feed list will reveal a bookmark action, as will the overflow menu in the feed viewer.

The app now has an icon too, which was made with the help of ChatGPT. I haven't consulted the agents about a better name though.

I did get my hands a little dirty to try and speed up the Webviewer. I think I made some success with removing the max-resizing from the viewport meta tag aded to the HTML the Webviewer opens. It could be psychosomatic, though. It feels a little different after I added it, but only if I'm using the actual phone. I see no performance issues in the simulator. I even tried comparing two screen recordings I made before an after the change, but I couldn't see a different. Since then, the scrolling has become choppy again. Sigh. That's one downside with choosing Flutter for this: you're bound by the speed of the language runtime. Maybe if I got the coding agent to port it to plain Android… 🤔

But the proof of any app is in the pudding: am I actually using it to read my RSS feeds? And the answer is yes, I am. It doesn't do everything a full-featured RSS app does, but what it does it does reasonably well — jankiness Webviewer scrolling aside — and I find myself turning to it at lunch or during my commutes. And even though there aren't any unread counts anywhere, it's slightly ironic to find that this river-based pattern has turned me into a bit of a completeness, wanting to get through today's feed before they drop over to recents. Oh I still save the odd post by keeping it marked as unread (the "Mark as Unread" action is optimised for this, in that it actually kicks you back to the post list when you use it), but not a frequently as I have been.

Anyway, my need for changes for this app might settle a little as I just go about simply using it for a while. But with the use of these agents, it's pretty amazing what they can be accomplish in a week.