punkassjim

The predicament with feed reading apps is most certainly not in the quantity of the selections; rather, the quality. This is not to say that most of the legitimate feed reading apps on the iPhone have not been developed with care — but as agents of delivery for my favorite authors, and as contrivances meant for enjoying lengthy bits of text, I prefer a simple app that does less and does it better.

Read Shawn’s whole article, linked above. It’s a little meandering (as am I, and often), but he’s right on the money.

I’ve been on a hunt for the perfect RSS reader for iPhone since day one, and as excellent as I think the major developers are, somehow every single app has a wart on its nose.

I’ve used NetNewsWire (AppStore link) for years on the desktop, so I always tend to go back to that on the iPhone. But even with the large number of improvements that Brent put into it for v2.0, there’s still something that feels not-quite-right about it. Shawn talks a bit about it in his post, and I don’t have much more concrete to add.

When it was released, I was pretty enthusiastic about Fever°, especially since it claims to enable you to subscribe to as many feeds as you want (way more than you’d ever read on the whole), and it’ll aggregate the hottest items that you should check out. The idea is excellent, and the implementation is indeed all I was hoping for…but without a native iPhone app to access the content (it’s self-hosted and browser-access-only), it falls very short of my daily needs. Several months ago, I stopped using it because I was commuting via train and subway. I’m no longer doing that, but the thing that’s keeping me away is the iPhone-optimized web UI. While pretty good, it makes superfluous use of CSS transitions which only serve to slow down the UX. Just not speedy enough. One of these days, when I’m feeling particularly nerdy, I’ll go into the source code and see if I can create my own front-end theme for Fever°…but now that I’ve made the transition from NewsGator to Fever° to Google Reader, I’m hesitant to spend the time on anything that’s outside of the Google ecosystem. The switching was getting tiresome.

Before NNW was updated to 2.0, I took a chance and bought Byline (AppStore link). The UI has a certain visual quality that resonates poorly with me, buttons that don’t have easily-identified meanings, and inferior visual feedback for certain tasks. Is it a good app? Yeah, it’s good. But with the glut of free and cheap apps out there, I feel like I would have been better served to save my money until something excellent came along.

A month or two ago, I saw Merlin post a screenshot of his iPhone, which had Reeder (AppStore link) prominently displayed. And Merlin’s not only a man who knows the value of time and attention, but he also gets quality design. So I figured I’d check it out. But even though it seemed rated highly in the AppStore, I saw a lot of negative comments about a) no saved state, b) slow updating, and c) non-intuitive UI. So I stuck with my old standby, NNW.

But today, after reading Shawn’s post, I decided to give Reeder a run for its money, and so far I’m quite happy. I realize that a) my actual usage relies very little on saved state, and b) saved state is coming in the next version.