Threads A-La Mail

[djmori]

I have a little request. It would be cool to have some kind of thread buttos, so posts that are talking about the same thing -from different sources- are automatically put togheter just like mail does with the mails. I have 15+ News sites and 15+ Apple sites and most of the time I find a lot of posts that are in essence the same thing.

[stevepa]

I imagine that it would be a pretty interesting challenge to actually identify those related posts since, unlike e-mail, there's no subject reference field in Atom or RSS fields.

(I'd consider this an exercise for any enterprising developer to contribute the code to Vienna to make this possible. I certainly think this would give Vienna an edge over other newsreaders out there.)

[djmori]

Agree.
I'm aware that this is a big chalenge... but hopefully will make this an unique app.
I've been thinking in some options: The most simple is to compare the titles (word by word), and then decide based on a matematical formula wish articles should go together:
Ex. if "words that where on both/total words on 2 specific titles" >> 0.5 then put the articules togheter in thread mode.
The app should, of course, be configured to omit some specific words like prepositions.

[djmori]

any ideas stevepa?

[stevepa]

I've been heads down on 2023 so I haven't spent much time thinking about this. I'd expect to think about this more in three weeks after which I'd expect 2.0 would be out there and I'm getting into 2.1 design work.

That said, my instinct would be to approach this as trying to solve the general problem of grouping together related articles instead of "threads a-la mail". I'm pretty sure that outside of the RSS/Atom comments attached to an article, you won't see anything approach threads. The other possibility is to thread articles by Technorati-type references but these aren't commonplace enough to justify the development work compared to other things.

So going back to my instinct, automatically deriving a list of keywords from each article and then creating automatic 'smart folders' based on those keywords would be one approach. Another would be a simple extension to the Search field that would allow you to enter any keyword and it would display all articles from everywhere that match the keyword.

Given 2.1's focus on UI improvements, something like this is definitely under consideration but it remains to see what is the most workable design that I can come up with that will have value for more than half the users of Vienna.

[djmori]

So going back to my instinct, automatically deriving a list of keywords from each article and then creating automatic 'smart folders' based on those keywords would be one approach. Another would be a simple extension to the Search field that would allow you to enter any keyword and it would display all articles from everywhere that match the keyword.

I think that the "smart folders" aproach is preatty good; of course it will be better to present it (in the GUI I mean) as something different as common smart folders... maybe not in the left pane, but in the right one.

Any way lets keep this on hold for about a month.. until eveything else is done.

[djmori]

I want to reopen this... maybe trow in some ideas about how can this be implemented.
What fou you guys think about:
A) Implementation. How can this be done?
B) GUI how this feature shuld be presented to user?

IMO

A) Some kind of criteria (math formula?) to compare feeds (titles or content) would be nedded. Also some way to compare big amounts of articles in a fast way.....Metadata could be a nice way to go: maybe store every (3+ letter) word of the title of each article as metadata and then let spotlight do the trick?

B) I belive the way mail handles similar messages is the right path to go. Is simple and very intuative.

[stevepa]

SQLite can handle keyword searches across folders quite easily and quickly. This was the reason I choose to put everything into a single database as opposed to splitting feed contents across multiple files.

Also take a look at SQLite's support for user-defined functions. Given a string X used in the context of 'LIKE(X)', SQLite will call back a user defined function with X and Y where Y is the item in the row to be compared. You can then perform soundex or some other means of comparison between the two.

As for the UI - I'm pretty sure you'll be aggregating articles from multiple sources as the odds of a match within the same feed is likely to be lower than across feeds unless the feed is of the rare conversational type. So with the selection on an article, a "Show Similar Articles" command could create a temporary group view listing only the matching articles OR indent the matching articles below the selected article. Or indent the selected article AND all related articles under a new pseudo-article called "Articles relating to X" where X is the subject.

There. That should get you started. Let me know when you're done. :-)

[djmori]

There. That should get you started. Let me know when you're done. :-)

Thkns stevepa for that post.. its really usefull.
I'm no dev, but I'll start resarching about this. I'll post news soon.


(if any one one to help me working in this, I'll really apreciate that)

[Michael Ströck]

Hi djmori,

The idea sounds pretty neat. How would you like to visualize the grouping of posts? Do you have any specific ideas? If so, why don't you make a quick mock-up in Photoshop, so we have something to drool over and think about :-) ?

A contextual menu for "find similar posts" would be really nice. As far as I know, there's not feed reader that does that, right now.

[djmori]

Hi djmori,

The idea sounds pretty neat. How would you like to visualize the grouping of posts? Do you have any specific ideas? If so, why don't you make a quick mock-up in Photoshop, so we have something to drool over and think about :-) ?

A contextual menu for "find similar posts" would be really nice. As far as I know, there's not feed reader that does that, right now.

I'll post a couple of mock-up tonight.
I'm glad you find this idea interesting!

[djmori]

Opinions?

[djmori]

anyone? any ideas?

[stevepa]

Looks great! The article list pane looks right to me. The only suggestion is that the toggle button should probably go somewhere else. Its current placement suggests that it is somehow linked to the search field. Which isn't true.

I'd probably put it to the left of the Refresh button.

[djmori]

This will be my first project as a dev ... so the developing of this feature will probably take me while. I'm sure several versions of vienna will be realesed first, and I will like to have a clear idea of how vienna will look then before I start messing around with the source.

I was wondering if you're planing to update the GUI soon? I saw http://sudo.ch/~dkocher/2006/01/16/vienna/ and imhu it looks great!. if anything like that is in the furure of vienna, I guess the toolbar is where that "threads" button should go.

Anyway, I'll really like to hear from you what you have in mind (GUI-wise) for vienna... after that I'll start thinking (and researching), how we should compare articles.

[djmori]

Any ideas about the future of vienna GUI Steve?

BTW, could you move this to "vienna developers"