First Impressions of Artemis: James’ ‘Calm Web Reader’
Yesterday, James (of James’ Coffee Blog) announced his newest web project, Artemis. He billed it as “a calm web reader” that he uses “to follow my favourite blogs and websites” with three main design goals:
- I want Artemis to be part of a web exploration journey, so every web link takes you to the author’s websites.
- I want the interface to make me feel calm, not overwhelmed like other readers.
- I want the tool to be slow so I don’t feel compelled to check it regularly.
He delivers on all three fronts!
When he wrote an earlier blog post talking through its design and purpose, he said two things that resonated with me:
I wanted the reader to be the interface through which I found blogs that I could then open elsewhere. This drastically limited the scope of the project. Rather than having to design panels for how to show blogs, I decided I would read them on everyone’s personal websites. Indeed, I love going to people’s websites to see what’s new. A reader could encourage this by directly linking to websites.
and
The reader updates once per day: every day in the early morning. So, when I wake up, I have my morning paper.
So, when James opened up a beta to the public yesterday, I jumped at the opportunity to try it out. I tinkered around with it this evening, adding 14 authors to my account and hoping back and forth through all the things they published in the past few days.
In his invitation email, James asked for feedback and for me to share the project with others. I thought I’d feed two birds with one scone. Here’s the feedback email that I sent to James tonight:
Thanks for the invitation to Artemis, James! I tinkered around with it for a bit this evening.
So far, I’m very impressed. It’s clean, it’s fast, and it’s easy to use. I’ve been thinking for some time that I’d like to have a reader that defaults to going to the author’s website. Ideally, it could cache the pages in their given style for offline reading, but that’s not super necessary. I like Artemis for, as you said, being a newspaper-like experience for my favorite sites.
Bonus: Using Artemis got me to finally learn the keyboard shortcuts for going back through a tab’s history! Spacebar-ing through articles and then hitting
⌘ [to go back to the list is nice.A couple of small notes:
- It would be nice to be able to rename authors. Some don’t have their author names quite right, and I just know it’ll bug me to see that day after day.
- A dark mode would be easier on the eyes when the rest of my system is dark in the evening.
- I added the web app to my home screen on my iPhone — also a good experience! But it definitely needs your little coffee cat as an icon… maybe reading a newspaper?
- Perhaps a style could be added to viewed links so that one can more easily keep track of their place if they’re jumping around from article to article?
Great start. I’m excited to see where this goes.
Good luck!
— Jarrod
If this project sounds of interest to you, I encourage you to give it a try! You can sign up here and use the invite code coffee to get into the beta. (James permitted me to share it. 🙂)