Giving Ohpan beta a go

I discovered Ohpan by A Type Studios through Twitter and decided to give it a go. You can too if you check out their latest blog post to find one of the beta keys. The ones that work as of this writing are ATYPE1 and GENYTO.

It’ll ask you to log in through an OAUTH provider like Facebook or Gmail. Once you do that it’ll create a user name for you, as well as check your contacts to see if you have any friends on the service so you can forward news to them.

Once you’re in you’ve got a two column news feed filled with rectangles that scroll leftward. You can change direction and speed using the left and right arrow keys, and you can generate new columns by using the search function. When you hover over the news boxes you get two options: star (vote up) or slash (vote down and remove box.) When you click on the box it creates a pop-up that shows you the entire RSS item which could be the entire story. It also has a link to the page.

The user interface looks very slick but the UI could use a few tweaks. Understandable since it’s a beta. Here’s what I’d change: Add a pause button (apparently a frequent request.) Turn off the arrow navigation when the search bar has focus, and allow the enter key to work on the search field. Lastly, allow a vertically scrolling ticker for those of us who still have a 4:3 monitor.

There are still a few kinks to work out. I downrated thirty sports articles hoping to get rid of the sports category only to find that it gave me nothing but sports entries for an hour after that. It doesn’t allow you to add feeds yet since it’s in early start-up phase, but they’re willing to take e-mailed OPML files in the short term.

It seems that they have an iPhone version coming up. I hope that they’d bring out a Windows Mobile version too, I’m sick of using reddit when killing time on the go.

ReadWriteWeb just posted a blog entry that also includes more beta codes.