Some people go to the beach on Memorial Day and celebrate the coming of summer.
I spent the entire weekend using large language models to build my ideal RSS reader.
As someone who reads the news for hours out of the day, I wanted to make it faster to do just that (read: spend less time reading the same amount of news) without missing anything. For the longest time, I felt a dating app-like swipe UI would be great, but no one made it to my knowledge — or at least in a way that syncs with services I already use.
So, I asked Claude to build it for me.
Enter NewsSwipe
NewsSwipe is the news how I want to read it. Simply see a bunch of news items as cards, one by one, and swipe through them. Left swipe marks the item as read. Right swipe pulls up a menu that allows you to save it for later, open the share sheet (to send the story anywhere), or send it to ChatGPT for a summary (marked in the app as "Digitalize It").
Here's the full note I put in the TestFlight build:
Hi. You got this because we're friends and I'm trying to make reading the news suck less.
All this is right now is a Newsblur client using a card-style UI for swiping left and right on the news.
Left swiping marks something unread.
Right swiping opens sharing options, including "Digitize It," which really sends it to ChatGPT for summaries.
It may work offline. That was something I really tried to make happen because I get stuck on the subway sometimes.
The UI is barebones but there's a semi-hidden menu to make micro adjustments to appearances in the Settings menu.
This is going to be continuously improved over time, but it's the stepping stone for another project I'm working on. That said, I will continue to support it for as long as I read the news (read: forever) and improve on it. This is the News app I've wanted for the longest time.
It'll be free forever, albeit with a donation link eventually in the user/settings menu. Just trying to recoup the $107 apple charges each year for a development account. Not trying to get rich here. Nothing will be locked behind a paywall.
It works on Newsblur now, which is $36/year. They're fantastic. You should subscribe to them.
It may work on other services later and on its own sync via iCloud. I still have to figure that out. That's a lot of work.
In the end, I built this in a weekend using Claude and ChatGPT. I will continue to iterate until I am fully satisfied, which is almost never.
Bluesky integration coming soon. Almost cracked it!
Icon is my wife and cat. That will change in the App Store version.
Thanks for using this. Support journalists! Support non-algorithmic news! Get tf off Twitter!
NewsSwipe is an RSS reader for now. I say "for now" because it'll always be an RSS reader, just one that hopefully normal people can use.
Normal people (of which, in this specific context, I am not) don't care at all and are even turned off by the idea of learning acronyms like RSS and XML and couldn't be arsed to go to the footer of news sites and look for specific links that will help them parse all headlines in incredibly specific apps. They want news as easy as they get it in their social apps, if not easier. Some don't even want it at all, which may explain the state of the world. My goal is to make this app work for them, not just for folks who use RSS for everything.
For now, however, NewsSwipe integrates into NewsBlur, a fantastic RSS reading service that I've used off and on for the better part of 13 years. It costs $36 to join. It'll support more services and even a local service later when I have time to figure that out.
I Suck as a Developer
I have zero skills in terms of developing programs, save for maybe writing a "Hello World" app in C++ a while back. I even went to college in 2004-2005 for Computer Science, but dropped out because I found it boring as all hell. In fact, hating Computer Science is what possessed me to get my English degree, which is how I got this career of mine over the last fifteen or so years.
That said, I had ambition to build apps with pre-made tools and maybe even learn a little Swift in the process. That's why I bought an iPad in 2017: to learn Swift, which seemed to make things easy in terms of app development. Instead, I used it to read comic books and watch movies on planes.
Fast forward to recently, when large language models like Claude and ChatGPT made it so you can develop apps with language that they translate into code. As I learned recently, you can actually hook xCode directly into ChatGPT and it will (sometimes) make changes for you. This is exactly what I did: use Claude Opus 4 to build the app, and ChatGPT to help debug (purely because of the xCode integration and I kept running out of tokens on Claude). Now I can remove all that guilt of doing nothing constructive with that iPad for 8 years!
I don't know how to "code," but I do know how to troubleshoot, and quite well, because I've been working in tech for quite some time and picked up quite a lot via osmosis. I know what works and why, and I know how to read errors to the point where I can assume what's going on. I know why something is probably broken and the path to getting it fixed. I just don't know how to fix it myself on the micro level, which is how LLMs have gotten me this far.
After over a few dozen builds, I have a tad more than an MVP. I'm going to continue developing (/prompting Claude and ChatGPT) until I have everything I want out of the app, and will then query others on what they want and build it in as well. NewsSwipe is also a testbed for a larger project I'm working on, which I'll discuss at a later date, but my ambitions exceed far beyond a simple news app.
Access it Today
This is a real app you can use today. Right now, I'm adding friends and family to the TestFlight, but you can hit me up here if you want access.
This is not my first app ever, as there were many tests over the last couple of weeks, but it is the first one I'm proud to share and use on the regular. It's going to save me an immense amount of time, and hopefully get more folks to read the news. It's just scratching the surface in terms of my ambitions, but I truly feel it's a great first step.