If I’m deep into writing a book or a legal client project. Twitter is the social network that I participate in most and yet sometimes days go by where I don’t load the application. The reason I’ve stuck with RSS is the way in which I work. As social networks took off, a lot of my friends that were previously big RSS fans gave up on the technology and instead relied upon sources like Twitter and Facebook to get their news. It is a great way to read blogs and the backbone of podcast distribution. The MacSparky RSS, for example, gives RSS applications a list of all the articles I post here since you last checked int. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a way to queue up and serve content from the internet. Having used Reeder 5 now for a few months, I’ve got a couple of tips:įor several years now, the trend among geeks has been to abandon the RSS format. It is still an attractive app with an opinionated design. Also, while Reeder doesn’t look as nice as Unread, it looks nice enough, and it has lots of features aimed at making the reading process easier. I thought that might be a deal-breaker, but the convenience of having everything in one app wins in my book. Unread has more options for color schemes and designs for the article view. If there is one trade-off, Reeder doesn’t display the articles as nicely as my previous RSS reader, Unread. Instead, the developer releases a new version every few years that you buy over, but it is still far less expensive than what I paid for subscriptions. A nice bonus is that Reeder is a one-time purchase. It does all of this in one application, and in addition to the iPhone and iPad apps, there is also a Mac app. This newest version of Reeder does a good job of managing your feeds, displaying your articles, and giving you the ability to set them aside to read later. With this most recent version, the Reeder developer has included tools to view your RSS feeds (Reeder’s original purpose), manage feeds, and save articles for reading later using your iCloud storage.Īs someone who is normally skeptical of all-in-one applications, I like the idea of this update, but I wasn’t so sure about whether it would solve my problems. When Reeder released version 5, I decided to give it a try again. I used Reeder awhile back but moved to the above concoction of apps for many different reasons that I’ll refer to as “nerd-based app creep”. In addition to being expensive, there is a certain amount of mental overhead that comes with managing data between three services that I would prefer to avoid. I currently use a Feed Wrangler account ($19 per year) to manage my feeds, Unread ($20 per year) to view my threads, and Instapaper ($30 per year) for read-it-later. Looking at my toolset for managing RSS, it’s getting expensive. I remain a believer in the RSS format and use it daily. We gave coverage to both of these topics last year on the Mac Power Users ( MPU 550: The World of RSS) ( MPU 554: Read-it-later Services). That's great news to me.RSS and read-it-later services are near and dear to my heart. This is the first version that works as I always hoped it would work. It is using practically no CPU cycles during idle times. I can quit the app instantly now and restart it instantly. I can navigate the side panel with the up/down cursor keys very quickly, without any lag. It started up very swiftly and refreshing all feeds was much faster. Force quitting an app is not something you want to do ever, but especially not on a regular basis. Oftentimes I had to force quit it because it became unresponsive during the quit cycle! Another really annoying thing was that, if I left the app idle for any period of time, and then tried to go back to it, it was unresponsive and I had no choice but to force quit it. Next, I caught the app hogging 100% of one CPU while it idled, even though I had settings to manually refresh feeds! If it quit at all, using the normal Quit mechanism, it would take many more minutes to finally quit. Then manually refreshing all feeds took many more minutes. First it took many minutes for the app to start up and stabilize. Much to my disbelief, this behavior has been eliminated in the new version! Thank you! Another thing was the unresponsiveness in general. It took ages to get from one feed to a target feed so I was forced to use the track pad, something I try to avoid. That said, previous versions were impossible to navigate with just the keyboard because the app refreshed the display of every feed as you went up/down the list, even though the content itself was not refreshed. The only reason I stuck with it is that there is nothing else that even comes close to its (poorly implemented) functionality. I've been using this app for a few years now and I have to say, up until this latest version, it has been the buggiest, most unresponsive app I have ever used. This rating only applies to Vienna3.1.4, which finally got it right.
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