I'm surprised you aren't getting more love on this one. I've already added the site to my bookmarks bar. I love reddit primarily for the images.
Usually my browsing of reddit is done like this.
1. Click homepage.
2. Determine which links are images.
3. Click image link
4. Chuckle, or shrug
5. Two finger swipe back on my trackpad on lion
6. Scroll
7. Repeat 2 - 6
Now its
1. Go to Mongout
2. Click right
3. Repeat 2 ... again and again
I'm also a big fan of the progress bar. If there was no bar I'd feel ungrounded in the infinite space of reddit. Additionally, because its so addicting to look at reddit images, I can say to myself "I'll look at enough images that fills one progress bar"
Its super simple, and really well executed. Big time props!
I think the progress bar is the most brilliant part of this whole thing. I don't read reddit, not because I don't think I would find it interesting but simply because I know it would suck so much time that I stay away. I did the same as the above poster and found the progress bar a really great and satisfying way to limit my time on the site (interesting that most sites have been pursuing the opposite goal in recent years).
I'm one of those that thinks 'gamification' is generally a bad philosophy, but to the extent that this partitioning into discrete consumption units could be called that I think it really works and adds a lot of value to the experience. My only problem with the site is that there's no clear indication anywhere that reddit is where the content is being pulled from, and it took me a bit to figure out how to get to the original page — maybe clicking the image could bring up the reddit panel from the bottom as well, but with some content-swapping to insert the full-size image into the reddit page above the comments?
I can't imagine using this over reddpics. Their tiled interface allows me to browse posts faster than the normal reddit interface. This in contrast feels slower than either, since you can only see a single image at a time.
right/left was pretty snappy for me, but I found myself wishing it would preload the reddit page each time. I found myself hitting [up] for every single image (because I needed the explanation that often..)
I like it. Imgur actually has left / right arrow support as well. (Example: http://imgur.com/gallery/ExxXR then hit →) I find it works well for a few chuckles if I happen to be eating at my desk in search of some web bubblegum.
It's probably worth noting that in other parts of the English speaking world, the word "mong" is derogatory and offensive.
I'm not sure if "MongOut" is a derivative of MongoDB, but if you're aiming at a maintream global audience you might want to consider the sensitivities.
In UK slang, to "mong out" is to relax on a sofa in a state of immobility, generally after overenthusiastic herbal indulgence.
It may be related to the insult against those with downs syndrome, but people aren't thinking about that when they say it. They're thinking about lying on their bed with a laptop having just woken up at lunchtime, browsing through funny pictures using only the arrow keys.
Thanks, we've got similar feedback previously, but decided to stick with the name as it was memorable. I do realize that this is something that could put people off though.
I have popslide.com that I will probably never get around to using. Might be useful here? Make the images slide in a little and add some popping element or branding component.
I just use a bookmarklet I wrote (https://gist.github.com/1572878), which enables me to go to any reddit page, and then click the bookmarklet to see all the images inline.
1. Preload next image? My connection sucks so pre-loading would be extremely valuable.
2. I would also love to see the top comment for each photo. Though, I suppose that may make it less addicting and cause traffic to bleed back to Reddit.
Right, I'll just round up my suggestions and those I agreed with from other comments:
- In portuguese, and I imagine a lot of other languages, "mongo" is a pretty nasty word. Think "retard", only worse.
- Have this linked with your reddit account so you can up/down vote. Also, then you could, by default, show pics from the user's default subreddits. You should allow an user to add/remove subreddits to get pics from, independently from the user's default subreddits.
- Gamify this. Think up some sort of achievements (opting out has to be an option, of course). First step: you have that bar filling up, what about having a counter nearby, which increments everytime the bar fills?
- You should do some preloading up to a max of USER_CONFIGURABLE_NUMBER images, have a sane default like 1 or 2.
That's it for now.
Edit:
- I just got a imgur "this image is no longer available" thingy. I think you can scratch those from showing up entirely.
- You could add some sort of sharing feature. A permalink would be a nice step in that direction. I just found an image I'd like to share with a friend and I noticed mongout wasn't gonna be a part of that process.
- We didn't realise that mongo had such a negative connotation Portuguese - in british english it doesn't. We'll probably stick with it for the time being but change it if we offend people.
- Yes, we really want to add in a way to select different subreddits. Not too sure about letting people sign in though but definitely a good idea.
- We might go for non-obtrusive game mechanics, so the progress bar + points + leaderboard + tweet progress. It just didn't make it into this release.
- Preloading images is a good idea that we didn't think about.
I'm fairly sure not, but it was one of the first things that I thought about when reading the URL.
The portuguese/brazillian web users are suckers for this sort of quick-fix, instant-gratification entertainment [1]. I, personally, would take no chances with the apps name. It wouldn't be the first time the portuguese language had a play on significant naming decisions [2] :)
No, I don't think so. I've heard the phrase "to mong out" before. But still, the word is in the URL. Just like how Expert's exchange didn't mean to create a reference to gender reassignment with expertsexchange.com.
I've been using Flipboard[1] on the iPad to read pic heavy subreddits that I don't necessarily want to see everything from but like to browse from time to time.
Yahoo pipes[2] turns the subreddit's top stories .json representation into an RSS feed, and then Twitterfeed[3] posts that RSS feed to a custom twitter account which I can then follow on Flipboard.
I got this setup from http://miguelrios.org/reddit-in-flipboard/ and a handy trick is to combine subreddits. So for example I have the 'SFW Porn Network' reddits all combined using the + e.g., /r/earthporn+cityporn+... etc.
Some of the challenges I ran into, and surmounted, include preloaded images, URLs that allow you to link directly to the image, getting facebook sharing to register the image you are currently viewing when you want to share the image, zooming and unzooming large images, and saving favorites in user accounts.
Another challenge was elegantly showing the UI elements without in any way distracting from the image -- I think by fading them out after a couple seconds of mouse inactivty, we accomplished that pretty well. Left/right keys are obviously the best way to do things, but we also wanted "point and click" users to get it right away as well, so we allowed for that in the UI. I think mongout's way of doing it is pretty elegant though, with the picture of the arrow keys.
Things I still intend to iron out are the ability to mix and match arbitrary subreddits and non-reddit sources, and an integration with facebook accounts.
This has been my main side project for the past year, and I'd love to chat about any and all aspects of it :)
Well done. Kept me engaged to the last picture. A couple of observations though:
The left-right keys still advance to the previous / next picture in the background, when the comments are in the foreground. Suggest that a left or right hides the comments as well as moving forward or back.
I second the comment made elsewhere on pre-loading the next picture to save your users waiting for the load-time.
How do I navigate the comments with the keyboard? I use the cursor keys to scroll down, and it doesn't work, as up / down is mapped to show / hide comments.
Thanks. We actually had subreddit support in an earlier version but decided to take it out for the sake of simplicity. It's definitely a feature that we'd like to add back in though.
Very nicely made. My only criticism is the purple progress bar- what's the point of it? I thought I was going to run out of images when it filled up, but it just kept going. Is that filling an indication that it's going to yesterday's posts? It feels unneeded, it's distracting.
I love the idea of this, but one of the problems with building products like this is that it's basically other people's content (or other people's other people's content...) and is probably hard to scale a business around properly.
We've got some pretty granular analytics on the site. It'll be interesting to measure how much people are engaging with it. We'll probably write a blog post sometime over the next few days regarding this if anyone is interested.
Well, all the "christians suck, athiest rule!" posts do give it a more hostile tone. I'm not aware of any other subreddits with what amounts to hate-speech being allowed on the front page.
Yes, we, the rest of the world understand that the 'religious issue' in the US has become tied in with the 'political issue'. But (again speaking on behalf of the rest of the world) we just wish the US would grow the @@@@ up and get the @@@@ over it.
I was trying to make a joke about the addictiveness of reddit, but I agree, several of the subreddits are just complete bigoted shit. I've taken to just unsubscribing from them rather than getting angry everytime a post comes up.
Seriously, I enjoy visiting HN and loading all the articles and comments in a new tab that appeal to me then slowly going through them but since first landing on this beauty I've been clicking through images for the last hour!
This site's really slick! Do you think you could add an auto-play feature so it'll be a slideshow? I've got two monitors hooked up and it'd be a good screen filler to have that just running on one screen.
Neat! Intuitive, no explanation needed except for the diagram of the arrow keys below. Suggestion: Add a timer to show people how much time they waste (of course, not everybody wants to see that).
Slick site! It would be good if going back through the navigation history took you through the images you had viewed. Currently it just goes in and out of thread view.
I love the interface. It would be great if you could add the ability to login, upvote/downvote (near the comments icon). Realtime reddit content would be great.
I like this a lot. It's very difficult to hit the arrow buttons on an iPhone, though. An alternative navigation method or larger hit areas would be helpful.
I am in love with it. Never browsed Reddit with so much enthusiasm as I am doing it now. Like it so much, I created an account; I never cared for one before.
I was happy to see the onscreen arrows since many experimental UIs seem to be relying on the keyboard exclusively. I figured those keys meant some thought went into iOS support.
Regardless, I'm still having fun just clicking thru the pics. Thanks.
And if the author didn't talk with imgur's owner then it's very likely his domain will get banned (+bonus points for not linking to imgur). I know a site which can't hotlink imgur images and I'd imagine there's plenty of them.
Weird. You only posted two minutes ago, but our experiences seem to have been much different as it loaded the next images instantly for me. The only delay was for comment pages, but that's to be expected.
Usually my browsing of reddit is done like this.
1. Click homepage.
2. Determine which links are images.
3. Click image link
4. Chuckle, or shrug
5. Two finger swipe back on my trackpad on lion
6. Scroll
7. Repeat 2 - 6
Now its
1. Go to Mongout 2. Click right 3. Repeat 2 ... again and again
I'm also a big fan of the progress bar. If there was no bar I'd feel ungrounded in the infinite space of reddit. Additionally, because its so addicting to look at reddit images, I can say to myself "I'll look at enough images that fills one progress bar"
Its super simple, and really well executed. Big time props!