Email’s style-ability and interactivity steadily improved, while RSS/atom remained as library index cards, virtual typewritten entries awaiting discovery manually shuffling through the deck.

A useful feed indexing app or service would provide above-the-fold previews, on mouseover or click, of browser snapshots taken of the actual blog entry page. Given today’s bandwidths, that is not such a bizarre conception.

Vienna, the macOS feed app, extracts the title and summary for presentation in a typical lists-and-boxes interface, opening entries into a browser-like tab array, rendering them with Webkit, but in somewhat constrained fashion (no fullscreen, some links not opening as expected, limited JS).

Better than that, I’d like a better rake to help me select what to read, a bit of similarity ranking, preferring terms the user has previously indicated interest in.

All of this underscores the great power of the proprietary UX, within the content providers’ walled garden the user’s needs are catered to or ignored, in varying degrees. “Don’t like our notification regime? Tough luck, we don’t want you viewing our content through any other lens!”