Skyreader continues to get better! This week: more ways to discover cool things to read, improved reading tools, and more customizable home view.
From your follows
Most people these days discover cool articles via their social media feeds. This is great! The people you follow and the posts you engage with are a great signal into the kinds of articles you would be interested in reading.
But getting all your reading recommendations from social media is also bad because it's so easy to get sucked into spending too much time just doomscrolling.
So, Skyreader can now show you a feed of articles to read that were shared by people you follow on Bluesky.
You can choose to have shared articles show up in your main "everything" feed or just in its own "From your follows" channel.
This feature is inspired by the excellent (and Nuzzel before that) so check out Sill if you want a standalone and more customizable version. Having it integrated in Skyreader is nice because in one tap you can add an article to your saved list and then get all the nice reader features like highlighting and quick access to semble/margin collections actions.
Speaking of which, making notes in Skyreader has also been improved.
Notes in the margin
I've been having fun making the visual design of margin notes a bit more playful. Previously they were very SaaS casual (clean, sans serif, boring). Now they look hand-drawn with margin braces. It's as if you are scribbling little notes to yourself in the margin of a book.
When your screen is big enough you see all your notes in the right margin and all the community notes on the left margin.
On mobile where there is no room for a margin, notes show up as an asterisk that when you tap splits the paragraph and shows the note right there.
I've also cleaned up all the buttons to make it more obvious when you are creating a private or public highlight or note.
Share highlights and notes to Bluesky
Now that I've made taking notes and highlights better we need more ways to share them!
So now you can post to Bluesky right from the reading view of any article in Skyreader. Select a highlight or note and then tap the Bluesky button.
This opens a composer right in Skyreader with the highlight as an optional image so you have plenty of space for your own words (you can optionally toggle text highlights if they are short enough).
Customizing the home view
With the addition of articles from your follows and reading rooms and all your existing channels the home view was starting to get a bit busy. Now you can customize it to only show what matters to you.
You can toggle the visibility of each lane and rearrange their order.
More
I've been releasing fast and furiously so lots of other smaller features and bug fixes have made it in. If you are running into any issues or just have an idea for a sweet new feature let me know on the userinput board!