No, you aren’t missing anything. it’s horrible.

Ditto.

Seems like they went out of their way to break almost every usability rule there is. I think the “Take a Quick Tutorial” link is the best. I shouldn’t need a quick tutorial, I should just “get it” from the beginning. I actually think I will use this site in my usability lecture this week.

You must really really dislike it - you even made the link point to zopa.com instead of inform.com

It mentions on the 1st page that it works best with IE (although I prefer FF. So I used IE.

My thoughts:
It’s a bit quirky and not at all “elegant” in design, and it’s “discovery area” takes some getting used to. But, once you have selected an article, the Top Stories and My Sources newsreader interface is quite nice.

Split into 3 sections:
1. Top left it is easy to switch between sections (world news, sports, etc)

2. The bottom left gives an easy to read blurb on each aricls.

3. THe Right pane shows the whole article in html without having to open a new page or leave the reader (this alone - just IMHO - makes it much better than Readers like Bloglines, newsgator).

Separately:
1. The Flag article (for later viewing) feature is easy to use and handy.

2. I did find thh My Channles section tough to set up in a may that attracted meaningful results. A few common key words sometimes even attracted no results. Disappointing.

3. There is no way yet (they say it is coming) to add RSS feeds, let alone import an OPML so serious RSS feeders that target specific sites not included in their sources will find Inform useless.

4. The Hot Channels section is OK for people just looking to Discover news for fun but not very helpful for targeted searching.

The interface in general is easy enough to pick up in a few minutes. Again not elegant but definitely not awful?

NET I don’t understand your disdainful review. To me it is un unfinished product that may be useful to casual newsreaders or readers of the major news services. It needs some feature upgrades to be any use to power users (RSS and OPML import). Its Reader specific layout - once you have settled on a source is fine in fact quite good.

It’s a work in progress that shows some potential in my opinion. But by the sound of your comments it is clearly not useable with Firefox.

I mainly posted this because you seem so positive about nearly every product - many which seem pretty minor in use to me - so I was curious to check this site out after you lambasted it.

Regards,

And the links bar is gone, so no bookmarklets which means no social bookmarking. That alone is a deal breaker for me.

#4 - typo fixed. thanks Mario

#5 - I think it was the combination of the Times fluff piece, the fact that it didn’t support Firefox and that it presented itself as a google/yahoo killer. Also, this site has pop ups. POP UPs. Just incredibly stupid in my opinion. Also, I would have done a review and at least tried to point positive things out but the sofware was unusable to me. So I gave up and started firing missles.

I’d love an email from the company or a dedicated user telling me what I’ve missed. I’ll happily do a follow up if I’m incorrect.

When I click the link on the inform.com to open the news site, my antirirus program spotted a virus called JS.Wonka. Any one has idea about that? Maybe there is a wrong javascript there.

They write this on their FAQ. The virus doesn’t seem to be harmful.

Inform employs the very latest coding techniques to build its feature-rich and data-intensive news reading application for the web. Some antivirus programs have a trigger that shows a warning for JS.Wonka if they detect any complex Javascript code being downloaded by your browser. Unfortunately, this trigger can occasionally be activated by the code we use to deliver our web site to you, even though it is perfectly safe and clean from any viruses.

What bothers me is not so much that the product sucks but more the fact that it took 55 people and millions of wasted dollars to come up with this crappy product. Small teams are better.