A downloadable news reader

Download NowName your own price

đź“° PlayNews is a news reader for Playdate đź“°

Stay informed with the latest updates from your favorite news websites and blogs!



Features

  • Aggregated News Feed: Browse articles from multiple sources in one convenient place.
  • Crank to Scroll: Use Playdate’s crank to navigate through your news feed and articles.
  • Optimized Article Display: Images are automatically converted to 1-bit graphics, perfect for the Playdate’s monochrome screen.
  • Mobile Integration: Scan the on-screen QR code to access the full version in your phone.

PlayNews will stay 'Name Your Own Price' while I work out the bugs and polish the first release. Donations are appreciated in the meantime! Eventually, it’ll become a paid app (likely around $3–$5).



How to Use

Installation instructions:

Download the zip file and sideload it into your device following the instructions here

⚠️ Important: You must be on the latest Playdate OS (2.7.2) before sideloading the app. If you're on an earlier version, this app won't function properly. ⚠️

Adding sources:

PlayNews comes with a default set of article sources, but is possible to edit it to add your favorite blogs and news pages.

  1. Connect the Playdate in Data Disk Mode to your computer or phone
  2. Open the "PLAYDATE" drive and go to the "Data" folder and then to "com.pautomas.playnews"
  3. Open the "feeds.txt" file with a text editor. Each line in this file corresponds to a URL to a RSS or Atom feed for a blog or news page. Remove the sources you're not interested on and add the ones you want to follow.
  4. Eject the "PLAYDATE" drive and disconnect the device.
  5. Open PlayNews and after a refresh of the feed you'll start seeing articles from your new sources!
Updated 6 days ago
StatusIn development
CategoryTool
Authorpautomas
Made withPlaydate
TagsPlaydate

Download

Download NowName your own price

Click download now to get access to the following files:

play-news.0.0.1-alpha-4.pdx.zip 421 kB

Development log

Comments

Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.

This app is wonderful, it was great to find out that, yes there really is an RSS reader for PlayDate. My only request is that the main body text be slightly 'chunkier' as the single-pixel font can be quite challenging to read in anything other than bright sunlight.

Look forward to seeing the full release!

thanks for the feedback! Do you think using the same font as the title would work? Or is it too chunk?

The font used in PocketReader (also on Itch) works well. It’s chunkier without being overtly bold or semi bold, which is how I understand the titles in PlayNews to be. I like the way you currently have it where the titles are a different font-weight to the body text. 



Looked at PocketReader and they seem to be using Sasser-Slab which is the same font I use on the title (but the article title is always bold). This is how it'd look as the article content font. I could add an option to select the font if that would be useful.

That looks great to me, thanks for considering this. 

works awesome! note the instruction point 2, as the folder isn't clearly live.playnews

Good catch! Will update the instructions soon