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Alexander Cobleigh
I'm SUPER excited to announce the launch of Rad Reader! 🤩 A calm tool (Linux & Windows; 6MB & Electron-free!) for reading and following RSS feeds. I've been working on this for the past months during spare time and it's my first journey in making something polished enough to sell! To celebrate its launch the price is reduced to 4.95 USD (34% off) for the rest of the week! If that feels like a lot, please try the free demo!! Boosts very much appreciated! 125 comments
Alexander Cobleigh
So the model I'm trying out with Rad Reader is this: 1. Release the software with a paid price I don't know how/if it will work out, but I *am* excited to explore new models of making ends meet while also making new software happen :)
Alexander Cobleigh
Final: If you want a lifetime license (with no accounts and no subscriptions) for a calm #rss reader on Windows or #linux (~6MB binary), 10+ themes with liveloading of your theme tweaks + ability to make your own, a reader that is capable of reading the feed bundling format .opml and with built-in automatic export of your feeds *back* to .opml to prevent lock-in and LOTS of other nifty bits Well then, please consider buying Rad Reader! Thank you! 
Alexander Cobleigh
@bd thank you! 😊 and yes! i had that & you in mind when i was asking you questions about Stepper's model in venice! :> we both gotta have bread/paella money amirite 
Alexander Cobleigh
@krusynth and pardon the mac situation! i have no ability to test it out and lack the dev account + setup needed so i felt it was best to focus on my two main platforms still—thank you so much!! 
Alexander Cobleigh
@noracodes happy to hear i am in great company :> same here really, my old fraidycat install was perma-borked with no easy way of exporting feeds and it made me really sad 
Arch :arch:
@cblgh This looks really cool. My one request would be some sort of support for some common RSS feed sync servers like FreshRSS, but I could honestly live without that because of the OPML importing/exporting. Great work, will consider picking this up :3
ルビー
@cblgh@merveilles.town does it handle html and css well? I use those in my personal feed sometimes and would love another tool to recommend
Alexander Cobleigh
@rubymayvalentine well basically yes! it only shows the titles of posts and offloads the reading experience to where people will be reading / annotating (the browser of their choice) so the ux is you click a title that you want to read and it opens a tab (or the browser) for the associated post 
Devine Lu Linvega
@cblgh I'm super happy to see you try this model out. Everyone I know is building software for others to live off, and end up having no assets of their own. I can't open itch right now, but once we're back in victoria, I'll give it a try! Maybe it'll replace liferea :)
Alexander Cobleigh
@neauoire yo thank you so much! really means a lot to hear it from you 😊 if this even remotely pans out it'll be the start of making many more tools in this vein :) would be fun to hear your comparisons with liferea & feedback after trying it out!! 
jakintosh
@cblgh this is a cool model, I’ve contemplated something similar where the product page shows the number of hours put into the work along with the lifetime revenue, and then some little stats like the effective wage per-hour and average price paid (if using a name-your-price scheme). it’s interesting to sort of set a wage target to unlock “free software mode”, and might also encourage people to chip in a bit more to get to that point. congrats and good luck! 
Jason Cosper
@cblgh I like this model a lot. And I hope it works! Especially since I'm interested in getting it working on macOS once it's open sourced. 😉 
Alexander Cobleigh
@bnys oooh arm? yes let me look into that over the coming weeks! would you be up for trying it out? i will see on my end how i can best emulate that to test it on a real OS :) 
gadgetoid
@cblgh about time RSS made a comeback! Dare I ask how https://www.gadgetoid.com/feed/ looks?
Alexander Cobleigh
@gadgetoid the links work quite fine! rad reader's more of a digest kind of thing, it only shows the titles of the latest posts :) clicking a title brings me to your website in my regular browser (where i do my reading & highlighting) 👍 
Csepp 🌢
@cblgh Oooh, I quite like this approach to open source. 🤔 Giving the demo a go on Guix...
Alexander Cobleigh
@csepp any suggestion of tags? i don't really know so many except ours here in the town
Alexander Cobleigh
@csepp oh dang! yeah i tried my best to make it a static binary that would work on the most machines, would love to hear what you can find out & how i can maybe patch things up :) i'll write a post some time about the baroque deploy maneuver i opted for to increase baseline compatibility across linux systems. but still very much a baby in that regard :')
Csepp 🌢
@cblgh I don't know that much about the arcane art of dynamic library loading sadly. I think on Guix an FHS container is probably the best you can do, because the libraries it needs are not put in user profiles, so you can't just rely on some path variable.
Csepp 🌢
@cblgh Did more testing, it's looking for libwebkit2gtk-4.0.so.37, Guix has libwebkitgtk-6.0.so.4.0.3 and libwebkit2gtk-4.1.so.0.8.3, and some symlinked variants with simpler names, but no libwebkit2gtk-4.0. So all the webkitgtk libraries are newer. 
Alexander Cobleigh
@j12i ah sorry about that! my previous server died last year when we had a heatwave so i feel ya 😵
Alexander Cobleigh
@Vorsos i don't know yet! it depends a bit on how this whole thing goes. i figured for a start i would just focus on the devices and systems i know better, apple's process for making a binary that will work on their new OS versions seemed to be pretty difficult! 
Stanislaus Grumman 🇵🇸
@cblgh Got a copy! I hope this strategy works out for you! The UI is very calm :3
Alexander Cobleigh
@xiroux yooo thank you so much! yeah the calm ui is something i've really tried to focus on, alongside having a few different themes already seeded (click the little circle in top right to swap to the next / right click to go back to prev theme :)
Stanislaus Grumman 🇵🇸
@cblgh I've tried all of them already :3 I didn't know about the right click, neat! 
Alexander Cobleigh
@masukomi ah sorry! i haven't had a good mac setup in a while so i had no way of even entering that space. i looked into it and they seemed to have tightened the binaries such that they *must* be signed now before they can even be launched
Vlad
@cblgh First of all, I love your project. Secondly, charging money is good and there's nothing wrong with it. Lastly, have you considered a model where you both sell the software and make it open source? Users want to buy builds from you rather than get them from someone else b/c they trust you as the author, and you could add some non-code thing to your builds (e.g. design) that the open source version doesn't have. I'm using this model for a project, lmk if you want to talk. PS. Purchased ❤
Alexander Cobleigh
@vladh thanks for the feedback vladh! i am hoping this model will ease some fears i had with providing the source immediately & it being legally plausible that someone went and sold at lower cost/provided builds of it, would be cool to hear your perspective in depth as well :)
Dr. Robert M Flight
@cblgh OK, this seems kinda cool, but it feels like the "reader" part is broken. As in, if a feed includes the full content of the article in the feed, then I should be able to read it "in the reader" application. Yet everytime I click on an item, it opens the web-page. Is there someplace to submit bug reports? Or should I just use the discussion thing on "itch.io"? Also, "demo link" doesn't seem to be a "link", just bolded text on the info page.
Alexander Cobleigh
@rossk oh shit i didn't know that was a thing! thanks for letting me know, i will look into updating it so it works there as well :) and thank you for buying it!!! 
Richard Eriksson :thinkerguns:
@cblgh I haven’t used my Windows laptop in a while, but I will soon, and this looks great. Purchased!
DELETED
@cblgh ... though, it does seem to silently fail (nothing even to stdout) when I try to subscribe to http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/rss/rss_capital-weather-gang?itid=lk_inline_manual_16 
JamesGecko
@cblgh Been looking for something like this for a while; there’s really not many good options on Windows. Almost everything is either unmaintained or requires a subscription. I was running a Linux reader through WSL2 with X11 for a while.
Mike Kanakos
@cblgh I need to check this out this week when I have some time. Any mobile apps planned in the future? 
Job
@cblgh if it wasn't for the fact that NewsBlur is like... a micro-social network through which I maintain connections with about 4 friends from college whom were just as invested in Google Reader as I was back then, I would immediately switch to this. Might still get it just to support the "open source it once enough sales have been reached" initiative :)   
tired blip
@rostiger @cblgh looks like the page says 350 purchases for source release! I'll be curious to see how this model works out - it's one I've considered myself if i ever have sellable software assets (since, yeah, FOSS is horribly broken by default and extremely few successful examples seem to exist of how to live off of it - my current co. is partially open-source, but took VC funding to get there, which is its own mess) good luck! buying a license myself to give it a try :)
tired blip
(woods) Downloads » ldd rad-reader-release AYYYEEEE looks like it should work on glibc *or* musl distros then. Thanks for doing that and not burdening us with DLL hell.
February (she/her)
@cblgh OK, downloaded the demo, and definitely gonna give you money for this. I think you've got an interesting idea behind the release model for this. Hopefully, it works well!
Alexander Cobleigh
@cryptix heheheh awyiss go for it! :> happy to finally feel that it's in a state that i can share about it X)   
Δῃάνειρα
@cblgh I can't run this on my daily driver because it's a stinky crApple but I think this looks wonderful, so I bought it anyway. I struggle to find a feed reader I feel cozy with, and I agree that the open source space is mostly broken and we need to try novel solutions. Congratulations, good luck and great work! When I get around to spinning up a Linux machine/VM again, this will be first on my list to try :)
Hugues Ross
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Gregory's Server
On the philosophical side of things: with the release of Rad Reader I'm trying out a new model of sustainable software production.
This tool has had a lot of thought, time, and care put into it, I would like to continue doing so with this + other projects. Crafting tools is made possible by the food I eat and the shelter I habitate, and I can't pay for either of those with Github stars or toot likes.