Introducing Pictuo
A year ago I set a very important goal for myself. I decided that I wanted to reach a point where I could conceive, design, and build any of my ideas independently…if only in the form of a working prototype. So I set out to teach myself to code. My front-end skills were passable at best, and while I understood the foundations of programming, I hadn’t learned a language.
On January 1, 2012 I reached that milestone. I sent out a link to very close friends to an app I’ve been working on for the last 6 months. Today I’m ready to open it up for public beta. The app is called Pictuo and it was born from a desire for a “visual feed reader”. There are more and more image-based blogs/feeds with each passing day. Text-oriented products like like Google Reader are not well suited for consuming them. Pictuo currently lets you add RSS feeds (or simply subscribe to a few pre-selected curated feeds) and view them in a clean, and elegant grid fashion.
As with any product, there is still much to be done. The design is not where I’d like it to be, the feature set is very limited, and there’s bound to be a few bugs. Being that I am only one person, I have to pick my battles accordingly. I do plan to eventually charge for the app, but I’ll be keeping the public beta period free.
So please go request an invitation, and I’ll begin letting people in at a *very* controlled rate. You can also follow Pictuo on Twitter here.
http://pictuo.com
Mike Gowen
Designer + Developer
