Create and browse news feeds

Discourse is a minimalist app designed to let you read your customized news feeds without being distracted by its interface.

The design of Discourse follows the aesthetics of the Windows 8 Metro interface. Your different news feeds appear as tiles, and clicking on a feed will expand it into another page of scrollable tiles of news stories. While reading, users will have the ability to save articles to view offline.

While Discourse has the ability to import RSS feeds via URL, there is no Google Reader integration, which is a major let down. You will have to build your feeds manually by browsing their collection of feeds and sites. This is a pain, especially if you are an avid Google Reader user. Hopefully Discourse will integrate importing Google Reader, Facebook, and Twitter feeds in an update. Applications like Reeder, Flipboard, and Pulse provide a much richer and personalized experience.

In this early version of Discourse, there were a lot of missing features. There is no ability to share articles at all. Many feeds will only give you a couple of sentences, forcing you to click out to the story. In doing so, Discourse will open up Internet Explorer, taking you out of the app. This is distracting and inelegant. Photos also don’t expand when you tap on them. Reading articles is enjoyable for the most part but would be massively aided by pagination.

Overall, Discourse aims to be a minimalist newsreader but is too minimal for its own good. There are just too many missing features that prevent Discourse from being a good news aggregator.