Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Google Reader Apocalypse

Jamie Zawinski:

Currently everyone and their mother is scrambling to write some new web-based replacement for Google Reader, but I don’t want that, even a little bit. I want a pair/trio of apps that synchronize. I have no interest in reading my feeds through a web site (no more than I would tolerate reading my email that way, like an animal).

I have yet to find a mobile RSS reader that feels fast enough, so I’d be happy with just an updated version of NetNewsWire 3 that doesn’t sync, but which fixes a few longstanding bugs.

6 Comments RSS · Twitter

John Gordon

Reeder and FeedBin

Like John said. Or Fever and Sunstroke. That gets you sync on your iOS devices at least. I'd be curious to hear why these options aren't cutting it for you.

@Kevin Like I said, the iOS apps that I tried (including Reeder) felt slow compared with NetNewWire on my Mac. I like how Fever is self-hosted, but its kindling/sparks model doesn’t seem like it would work for me. Does it work if you want to see every item? I like NetNewsWire’s folders and attention model. I don’t want to read feeds in a browser on the desktop. Also, I’ve found that, compared with the server-based options I’ve tried, NetNewsWire is better about fetching feeds faster and not losing items that have been deleted or fallen off the end of the feed.

Regarding the kindling/sparks, that can be ignored completely. You can still group by folder/tag and yes, you can still see every item.

Fever holds onto feed items for a max of ten weeks. It's easy to mark items as saved though, in which case they stick around as long as you want. Just like flagging an item in NNW.

I agree about using a browser on the desktop. It hasn't been an issue for me as I'm quite satisfied to do my feed reading on my iOS devices though. I'm not sure if there are any desktop clients that work with Fever but I never really looked into that.

The Reeder dev has stated he'll be bringing Fever support to the iPad and desktop versions to go with the current iPhone support. In the meantime, I'm quite happy with the Fever+Sunstroke combination.

Personally, a non-syncing, non-server based solution is a no-go as it's not uncommon to go a few days or more without checking my feeds.

@Kevin Thanks for the additional information. I think I may give Fever a try.

[...] the suggestion of Kevin LaCoste, I decided to try out Fever. I don’t think I’ll have much use for its signature [...]

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