A few weeks ago we decided to make it easier to consume news from inside Twimbow. The “Reader”, launched a few weeks ago, is the first example a few innovative features that are the result of this choice and we are going to introduce in the following versions of Twimbow.
As most of you should know, Twitter is becoming more and more a stream of valuable news coming from different sources and covering different topics, that you can easily consume while browsing your home feed or Twitter lists. What we wanted to do with the Reader is to create a seamless integration between the tweet containing a link to the news and the content of the news itself.
If you enable the Reader from the settings, most links to news, articles, blog posts and so on will be shown inside an internal window providing a newspaper-like interface. Everything but the content is removed and only the content (text, images, links and so on) is shown, letting you focus on what really matters.
It is an experimental feature, so not all websites are supported properly, yet. We plan to make this feature more powerful in the following versions of Twimbow.
How to enable the Reader
- go to “Settings” on top of Twimbow’s main dashboard
- switch “Open Link in Twimbow Reader” to “ON”
- close the Settings window (settings are automatically saved)
From now on, any link will be opened inside the Reader. Unfortunately Twimbow is not able to distinguish between a “normal” website and a news / blog post yet. That said, if you want to open a link which is not an article/news/blog post just use the “open link in a new tab/window” contextual menu option provided by most browsers.
Here is, for example, a post by TechCrunch as seen through the Reader, without the need to leave the Twimbow user interface:
There are a few options available from the main Reader window:
from left to right:
- text size through the “+” and “-” icon
- remove images
- go to source, i.e. jump to the original website
- save to Instapaper.com
Feel free to send us feedbacks and comments about this feature, we want to make sure to shape the next update of this set of features around the needs of our users.
