As we say goodbye to an era of newspapers with our attention spans shrinking past 15 seconds, we certainly need apps that can show us the latest news in less time. One such application I discovered recently is DevBytes.
About DevBytes
Much to the delight of developers who can't stay on the same screen for more than 10 seconds, DevBytes is a Tech News Application that brings you the latest news and updates in the form of flash-cards along with bells and whistles like hiring updates, crypto-watch and more in a small bundle of 6 MB.
Rated 4.6 with more than 100K downloads on the Google Play Store, DevBytes certainly has earned its hype for an app that is famous for "Latest Programming & tech news in 64 words".
First Impressions
The onboarding procedure is rather simple, the app tells you to pick an alter-ego to get an idea of your interests and then also lets you manually pick another few topics to curate your feed. You can also optionally sign in using Google or Twitter.
Spoiler alert: I had to choose Sheldon Cooper.
Here are some of the app's features that caught my eye instantly.
The Daily Digest
The Daily Digest contains a set of hand-picked news articles with the most important news of the day. This list is also maintained keeping your interested topics in mind.
What you'll also notice is that all of these articles are less than 64 words.
You hear that? Yeah, that's your attention span saying thanks.
My favourite bit is that it also sometimes contains memes like this one.
The Feed
We are in an era of infinite content and we need some amount of curation to get the best out of it. The Feed gives you a choice to maintain a separate category of articles that are purely from your selected interests. As the app suggests, "Your content, your choice".
Coding Snippets
Another useful thing about this app is that it also supports code snippets that come along with the articles in small cards. You can also copy this code to the clipboard and share it with your friends if you find it interesting!
Crypto Watch and Hiring News
The app also provides a separate tab to monitor your favourite Cryptocurrencies in real-time. Quite a nifty feature to have.
And while you're scrolling through the news, you will also come across hiring updates for various tech roles in different companies.
Swiping the other way
Keeping the best for the last, this is one such feature that you'll instantly notice as you launch the application where you're told to swipe down instead of swiping up. We're traditionally almost maintained a muscle memory of swiping up through content in different social media apps.
I feel that this in a way breaks that habit of swiping up and going back to those apps just for scrolling needlessly. Not to mention that scrolling on this app will make you learn more as well.
With its user-friendly interface, daily digest, custom feed, code snippets and other features like hiring news and crypto-watch, DevBytes is the perfect app for those who want to stay informed while on the go. If you're interested in trying out DevBytes for yourself, you can download it for free from the Google Play Store by clicking on this link.
You can also get DevBytes on the Google Chrome browser via their Web Extension.